QNX released the much anticipated 6.2.1 version of their QNX Momentics Development Suite (Standard and Professional Editions) at Embedded World in Nuernberg. The non-commercial (NC) version is expected to be released by month end. Press release here.
QNX Momentics 6.2.1 (SE/PE) Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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can’t wait for the non commercial!
/me sets aside a blank cd
set aside two cds
muhahahahahaha
Why? Is it going to be more then 650MBs?
A much waited enhancement, I will certainly welcome that when booting into this little marvel. Hey Sony, instead of Linux or Sun take a look at this!
I ran QNX RTP 6.0 a while back and it was awsome. Now, could someone fill me in, I was having one heck of a problem trying to get my USB mouse working with 6.0, has USB support improved in 6.2? What is the TCP/IP stack like? improved? from what I understand, QNX was going to give it a overhaul, has that happened?
any other neat additions to QNX RTP 6.2.0, please tell 😉 I am downloading the 6.2.0 iso now 😉
It used to be that when you moved the mouse rapidly, QNX died of interrupt death and couldn’t update the screen.
Did they fix that?
I remember when Amiga was going to use QNX as a base for a new os. WHY DID THEY NOT DO THIS …. Gateway! They should give them a call and extend a new Olive branch. Do what Apple did, since they don’t have the resources to make somthing from scratch! Not to offend the developers but, it is time to pull the plug on Amiga classic. Start with something solid, and build on it.
This is what I want for a desktop OS. Small, hard as nails and just launches applications. It should only take a few seconds to boot up. All that memory, clockcycles and hardrive space should be for applications and data. The OS should not take up GIGS of RAM! Aharr! What in the world are XP and OSX doing with all of those resources!?!?!?!?!
Dan
The OS should not take up GIGS of RAM! Aharr! What in the world are XP and OSX doing with all of those resources!?!?!?!?!
Why, painting all the nice GUI effects!
I wonder why QNX doesn’t have SPARC support… SPARC is used fairly often in the embedded world
I used QNX 6.0 too a while ago. Honestly, I think if QNX is pushed a bit, it will have more chances on the desktop then Linux. Installation of software is easy, configuring stuff is easy and it has very good looking fonts, as good as the ones in Windows if not better.
I might begin using it once the desktop becomes a little more smooth to use. The thing is an absolute breeze to install and I use it when I want to do quick tests on a machine.
But the apps department is still going slow. The texteditors seem awkward (probably mostly QNX GUI’s fault). The shell is underpowered as well as many of the built-in applications (Voyager, the mailer, etc.).
Development tools and documentation is very promising though.
Who knows… maybe it’ll be my main PC desktop in a year or two. 🙂
I installed QNX 6.2.0 on this computer about a month ago. It was nice, but i wasnt able to convert to it. There’s a lack of applications. Their media player is nice, but it cant play divx from what i understood. So i got mplayer, but performance was seriously lacking. Playing videos fullscreen made the whole GUI go to hell and back, changing video modes etc. Apparently thats mplayer’s fault and not QNX’s though. I got XPhoton going to be able to run X apps, and again, the performance is seriously lacking. The gimp took about 5 times as long to load in QNX as it does in linux. I have great respect for QNX, but my experiences with it made it impossible for me to consider it as a real solution for me as a desktop OS. Hopefully they fix these issues though, and make it possible to run Photon without their window manager, cause as pretty as it is, it’s too windows like in that you constantly need to have a hand on the mouse.
Actually I think QNX has one of the best text editors I’ve used, well actually it’s more than a text editor: Workspace. It does syntax highlighting for basically any language (you can now import Vim configurations), has a built in shell, web browser, debugger, etc… Basically it has more features than BBedit which is the other TextEditor I use a lot.
The rest of the apps, can be replaced with better apps. For example bash, Mozilla, Opera
I don’t believe QNX (Neutrino) is setup internally to run any sort of performance GUI. It needs messaging enhancements and a bit of redesign. It could probably run a low performance GUI… like a kiosk or DVD nav in a car.
From what I’m hearing, it sounds like the GUI is still tacked on and doesn’t work that well yet.
Amiga couldn’t be based on QNX. That is a joke. It wouldn’t work worth a damn. Amiga would be far better off using the 2.6x Linux kernel or that super low latency kernel that GNU/Hurd was looking at.
–ms
QNX’s kernel was never designed to be used for the desktop. It was designed for embedded machines that use one or two applications at a time. Because of this, running mutiple apps on the RTOS will slow the system down. Thats the nature of the beast.
The GUI performance issues in QNX are mainly due to its hard real time nature. Unlike in other kernels, the QNX scheduler is strictly priority based. This is great for real-time purposes, kinda sucks for a much more dynamic workload. QNX is supposedly getting a new scheduler, which should alleviatve a lot of those problems. What still bites, though, is the filesystem, which is agonizingly slow and antiquated. Desktop tasks are often very I/O bound, and the filesystem is a major bottleneck for QNX.
Yes, QNX’s filesystem needs a major overhaul..its slow and clunky.
I take it that they QNX people still never intend it to be useful as anything other than an RTOS development platform? I really think its a pretty neat OS. (not that I really know anything about such things…)
You couldn’t be furthur from the truth. Performance depends on many, many things, in this case, you are commenting on GUI performance which has direct ties to your graphics card. Some perform better than others. If you have an Nvidia, then chances are it isn’t supported in anything other than SVGA mode, which is 100% non-accelerated, and performance would be poor. The GUI is very responsive on supported cards, I’m running Voodoo3 and ATI cards and I can drag 30 fps MPEG videos around without a glitch on s P3/733.
The messaging in QNX is actually the power of QNX and where a good chunk of speed and robustness is acheived. I won’t go into details, but you SERIOUSLY need to read the system architecture guide. The IPC core of QNX is so well designed that it allows QNX to do things in the OS and GUI that would require extensive kernel and X server hacks to acheive in other OSes. Take your foot out of your mouth and read about the messaging core before you comment next time. The Photon GUI uses a messaging model that layers on top of the QNX IPC, this means that it inherits ALL of it’s features — the ability to transparently span machines on the network, efficient “ditto” capabilities, including a client for X and Win32 (phinx and phindows).
You ignorance shows when you suggest that “DVD nav” is a low performance app. That is typically 720×480 or higher at 0fps no-skip. That takes some doing. QNX 6 can handle that using less CPU than any other OS with a software only decoder.
The GUI is far from “tacked on”, as I mentioned before, it leverages the underlying QNX GUI. Additional capabilities just “fall out” of that design. If your design is poor then bugs fall out and it breaks when you shake it. If the design is good, more (unplanned) capabilites fall out.
As for a low-latency kernel… linux doesn’t come close, context switch times are double what they are in QNX on the same hardware (yes, I’ve measured it).
I won’t say much of anything on the Amiga comment other than this… to die-hard Amigans (of which you appear to be one), NOTHING can measure up to or replace what Amiga was. The truth is that Amiga is dead, gone, past history, it was ahead of it’s time, but the industry caught up, let the damned thing die.
The scheduling in QNX is pre-emptive and priorities are absolute. This *does not* make performance poor for a GUI, it simply means that to get optimal performance you need to fine-tune the various priorities and scheduling algorithms used.
You need to remember that QNX is an RTOS (real-time OS) and the pre-emptive priorities are an absolute neccesity in an RTOS. Basically, if a high priority task needs CPU it gets it, at the expense of lower priority tasks. To a desktop or linux user that probably sounds bad. It’s not when you put it in the context of what RTOSes are typically used for. If you are controlling a nuclear reactor (and yes, QNX is used in this environment) you want to be able to take your sensor reading and control that valve and NEVER miss that control cycle. It is desirable and perfectly legitimate that the sensor reading process should get all the cpu when it needs it and the user in his word-processor or text editor can (potentially) just hang while that occurs. In contrast linux (and most/all non-realtime unix) will still give a low priority task a percentage of CPU. That can [literally] kill you in an RTOS.
QNX is designed to be embedded. What that *really* means is that in most situations the environment is tightly controlled. You know exactly how many processes should be running at any given time, and it typically is a small number. In that environment you would tune the priorities of the various processes (ie. each process at a different priority) so that the ones you deem the most important get CPU when then they need it).
That is a fundamental difference on a desktop. The runtme environment is completely dynamic and tends to change dramatically. Of course you can also adjust priorities at run time, and once you know how, you can usually correct any performance issues on the desktop. The default environment has to make guesses about that apps you will deem high priority and which you will deem low. Actualy, it doesn’t make ANY assumptions, it just runs them all at the same priority (the only exception is compiling which lowers it’s priority).
If you know what you are doing, there are no performance issues. Period.
that when i was running an older version of qnx on my old voodoo banshee….
it most definitely WAS extremely fast…. i doubt if it had any 3d accel but thats not what this system was intended for… and if there was suddenly a demand for it… well im sure they would be happy to provide…
sorry to the person that said the performance would be better under linux but you’re COMPLETELY wrong
(posting this from a linux machine running nvidia’s latest binary drivers)
Most of the performance issues people perceived with QNX have nothing to do with qnx4fs but more to do with the fact that before 6.2.0 of QNX the EIDE drivers where not using UDMA. That change, along with some optimizations that have been made for 6.2.1 for qnx4fs, really give a huge performance boost.