4 ms·
Small additions here: the networking components of QNX moved to kernel space quite some time ago, I don't even know if io-net is still supported. As far as I k
by wogna 9y ago
Small additions here: the networking components of QNX moved to kernel space quite some time ago, I don't even know if io-net is still supported. As far as I know they've reused the NetBSD stack for performance reasons. Also, those 60KB gives you a bare-bones system that is far from what people expect a POSIX system to be; you'd have to add plenty of additional processes to get there.
I still have a soft spot for QNX though; I hope they'll survive RIM.
- Animats 9y agoAw, they put networking in the kernel? Dan Dodge would not have approved. 60KB was just the kernel, not the additional processes that run in user space. The great thing about such a tiny kernel was that it could be fully debugged. The kernel didn't change much from year to year back in QNX 6. Many embedded systems put the kernel in a boot ROM, so the system came up initially in QNX, without running some boot loader first. You built a boot image with the kernel, the essential "proc" process, and whatever user space drivers you absolutely had to have to get started. QNX went open source for a while, starting September 2007, and there had been a free version for years. After the RIM acquisition, they went closed source overnight and took all the sources offline before people could copy them. That was the moment when they totally lost the support of the open source community.