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During college, I was hired by a small company that specialized in QNX based software to port several Unix utilities (I remember porting finger and at least one
by spc476 10y ago
During college, I was hired by a small company that specialized in QNX based software to port several Unix utilities (I remember porting finger and at least one other program---I don't recall). It wasn't that bad as its POSIX support (even in the mid-90s) was pretty good.
What really blew me away about QNX though, was that the network was invisible. You could construct a command line on machine A, to run a program on B with a file on C, redirect the output to a program on D with that output going back to A. My boss, sitting in the office next to mine, would run a communications program on his system while using the modem connected to my computer. Wild stuff.
I also had a friend that owned a software company selling commerical X Window servers for a variety of systems. Their fastest version ran on QNX.
- vbezhenar 10y agoI think, you could do that easily using ssh with Linux. program1 | ssh server1 program 2 | ssh server2 program3
- geocar 10y agoIt's not exactly because ssh can't forward `/dev/ttyS0` It takes more than someone just adding a special adapter to produce such an interface, because you also have to change all of the modem applications that consume the `/dev/ttyS0` interface to also consume the unix-domain or TCP-based interface. Meanwhile with Qnet, an application simply goes open("/net/node1/dev/ser1") and gets the modem attached to node1. Plan9 has a similar capability.
- digi_owl 10y agoWould not surprise me if the GNOME people find a way to replicate that using dbus and their VT backend.
- frik 10y agoOh my... dbus something like OLE2/ActiveX, just 10 years too late and full of XML.
- swiley 10y agoLinux has 9p2000 support, I've never heard of people actually using it to export devices over the network though. Fuse also has support for ioctls and other weirdness so it's not impossible for something like sshfs to forward /dev over the network.
- asdaksdhksajd 10y agono.
- swiley 10y agoOh wow you're right! I don't know where I got the idea that fuse handled ioctls from.
- gnufx 10y agoFor what it's worth, there's a network block device over 9p: https://github.com/chaos/9nbd https://github.com/chaos/9nbd
- tyingq 10y agoIt's not at all the same thing, and not as transparent. But just in case someone reading wanted to do remote serial ports on Linux, there is rfc2217 and virtual serial ports. There's a program called ser2net that can bridge them for any program. Also, most serial port oriented software like miniterm, pyserial, etc, has built in support.
- i336_ 10y agoWow. So basically Plan 9 resource sharing, ported to the real world (ie something that's usable without modification or special consideration). D: