Saturday November 8, I received an email from someone, inquiring if I would be interested in "doing a first interview/introduction into a new operating system". We get these emails and news submissions all the time, and most of the time, "new operating system" means Ubuntu-with-a-black-theme, so we don't bother. I figured this time things wouldn't be different, but after a bit of digging around, there's a little more to it this time.
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Member since:2005-07-13
while there are tons of QNX vs LInux articles i could fine, none of them were comapiring QNX to the 2.6 linux kernel so I chose this one, ( http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_2870_1.html ).
I can verify this is correct that QNX can boot in a few seconds and is lightning quick and utalizes (at least on intel) multi core CPU's better than linux currently ( as up 2.6.27.5 ) as i have and develop for both. this has actualy promted me to do a bench marking of the 2 systems, both in just kernel and text mode, as well as light weight GIU's (linux with something like fluxbox, and QNX with photon).
but as someone who uses embeded version of QNX and linux daily i can honestly say QNX is faster in boot, alication load, and data write to the file system. as far as apication usage and responsiveness, well that usualy depends on the app, so it's a toss up.
Edited 2008-11-11 16:28 UTC
Member since:2006-01-24
poundsmack wrote:
-"and utalizes (at least on intel) multi core CPU's better than linux currently ( as up 2.6.27.5 ) as i have and develop for both. this has actualy promted me to do a bench marking of the 2 systems, both in just kernel and text mode, as well as light weight GIU's (linux with something like fluxbox, and QNX with photon)."
Well, the link was pretty pointless as it contained no comparison whatsoever. Also, while it's good that you have benchmarked it, a total lack of data aswell as how you've benchmarked them makes the statement pretty pointless and lumps it together with all the other subjective 'it feels faster' nonsense scattered across the web. By design, monolithic kernels should be faster than microkernels, is anyone disputing this? There are advantages with running everything in it's own process (stability being number one, modularity also comes to mind), but speed is not one of them. In a monolithic kernel the system call cost is setting and resetting the supervisor bit, and no overhead at all once in kernel space where all memory is accessable. In a microkernel you have to pass messages through the kernel out to different processes and they again have to respond through the same message mechanism which is alot slower than accessing process memory directly.
Now one can certainly question just how much this overhead is actually costing (I know there has been alot of improvement in the messaging and context switching which should help lower the speed penalty), and this is where some up-to-date hard data benchmarks would come in handy.
AFAIK most kernel's today that employ micro-kernel characteristics are so-called 'hybrid' kernels which uses ideas from both microkernels and monolithic kernels. Haiku (my favourite OS project uses a hybrid kernel where hardware drivers and (I think) the filesystem runs in kernel space (and thus can potentially crash the system), just like they can in a monolithic kernel. Personally I prefer speed over the chance that a buggy driver may cause havoc. If my system goes down due to a buggy driver, I will blame the buggy driver, not the system. If this happened to me often then maybe I'd sing another tune, but I seriously can't remember when I last had a system crash which was related to hardware/driver malfunction. Of course if the system were somehow responsible for keeping me alive or some such, then I'd probably go with maximum stability 
Member since:
2006-01-24
poundsmack wrote:
-"While there are less drivers for it the kernel itself is more stable and has far less overhead."
Far less overhead? iirc it's a hard realtime kernel, hence it sacrifices some efficieny in order to execute prioritized threads at exact times, also since basically everything runs as a user process it seems to me it pretty much must have more overhead than Linux, if you have any facts you can point to that shows otherwise I'd be very interested.
As for Anubis choice of Linux, my guess is that it mainly boils down to hardware support. Don't quite understand the 'stripping' part though, it's not as if the Linux kernel is bloated, particuarly not for what I assume is a desktop oriented os.
While I've always liked Aros due to my Amiga nostalgia, lack of memory protection (guru meditation memories comes back to haunt me) and smp etc isn't the best foundation on which to build a system for modern use. Add to that an API which really hasn't stood the test of time (imo).
So yes, I can definately understand that some developers might want to implement an Amiga-ish environment over a small, very fast kernel with broad hardware support. On the other hand I can also see why people who like Aros will see this as a bad thing.
However it is their spare time and I'm absolutely certain that they are the experts on how they want to spend it.
I wish them luck and will file this under 'another one to keep an eye on' while I passionately continue to stalk... follow the Haiku development.