QNX Software Systems today announced that the QNX Momentics development suite Professional edition v6.3 will include a new, fully integrated code coverage tool.
QNX Delivers First Embedded IDE with Integrated Code Coverage Tool
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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QNX is very slick. Looks like a neat feature for the QNX fans. Too bad they dont want to focus on the desktop market, because the desktop market keeps trying to go to them.
I’m not too sure if a true RTOS would be necessary or even desirable in an everyday desktop system.
I don’t know why you think that a true RTOS is not suitable as a desktop OS, but from my experience QNX is much better as a desktop OS than Linux and Microsoft.
One simple answer: The scheduler. Try starting 10 acive tasks on QNX. Determinism comes from simplicity.
Yes, start 10 active tasks at priorty 9. They will all fight for the CPU and leave EVERYTHING else in the system running with full interactive response time. That is personally why I love using QNX as a workstation, I have very good control over what is important with priorities.
1. I don’t think that active tasks are the usual kind of tasks a user runs on a desktop OS. Most of the tasks are idle most of their life.
2. Even if you want to start such a task (like multiplying 2 giat matrices) – you can set the priority to a low value (as Chris Mckillop just said) and effectivly make it a background process.
3. You seem to forget that the scheduler (that is mostly used) is a round-robbin with a maximum time allocated to each thread before preemption. So even if I start 10 tasks at the same time they will run “concurrently”.
4. The nice thing about RTOS is that (for example) you can play a video in one window (at high priority) and still be able to run other things without disturbing the video (even video playing is not a process without “long” wait states).