4 ms·

Which OS? What is your setup?

• deaddodo 6y ago
  Probably QNX or VxWorks.
  • neilpanchal 6y ago
    Also RTLinux kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux
    • monocasa 6y ago
      RTLinux is soft real time, FWIW.
      • rudolph9 6y ago
        Can you elaborate? The wiki says it combines hard-realtime with soft-realtime. It sounds like it depends how you configure it but this is the first I’ve read of it so I could be mistaken.
        • kijiki 6y ago
          They're just mistaken, RTLinux is hard realtime. It works by running a tiny real time OS on the bare metal, and then running a Linux kernel as a (lightly) paravirtualized lowest priority task. You write your hard realtime code to run on the RTOS, and then your soft/non realtime code runs on Linux. In this model, your compositor, input pipeline and (at least the UI latency sensitive part of) your applications would have to be ported to the RTOS, which makes this pretty infeasible. But it works really well if you have a some hard-realtime control loop talking to a bunch of non-realtime network IO or UI code. Would be a fun way to build a wifi controlled quadcopter. These days you probably want to use Xenomai, or possibly RTAI.
          • monocasa 6y ago
            Yes, I was mistaken. I was thinking of the preempt_rt patches. Thanks for the great writeup correcting me!
        • als0 6y ago
          RTLinux is a special supervisor below the kernel that allows you to run "hard-realtime" programs outside of the Linux environment with a lot of restrictions. Everything within the Linux environment is soft. As far as I can tell, it's not feasible to run the GUI stack in the more primitive environment.
  • jacquesm 6y ago
    QnX is correct.
    • tokamak-teapot 6y ago
      Is it feasible for mortals to get hold of and run QnX as a desktop OS?
      • pas 6y ago
        Apparently not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24346411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24346411
      • jacquesm 6y ago
        You might find an old archived copy of it but nothing that would be very useful if you intend to run a modern browser and other tools like that. For curiosity's sake you could. There used to be a one-floppy installer with the desktop on it, I'm sure you could get that to work in a VM. Lots of screenshots: https://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-qnx.htm https://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-... Docs: https://www.mikecramer.com/qnx/qnx_6.1_docs/sysadmin/intro.html https://www.mikecramer.com/qnx/qnx_6.1_docs/sysadmin/intro.h... Unfortunately I can't seem to locate any disk images, rumor has it there was a VMWare image floating around.
      • foundry27 6y ago
        Absolutely. The thing you need to be asking for is a hobbyist license, which might not always be advertised but is very much a thing!
        • PeCaN 6y ago
          I emailed QNX a couple years ago about hobbyist or non-commercial licenses and they replied that they no longer offer them.
      • Animats 6y ago
        It was once. I still have a machine in the closet with QNX 6.1 and the Photon GUI. It has a version of Firefox so old it's called Firebird. But after Blackberry bought QNX, they made it closed source and no longer self-hosting. Today you have to cross-compile from Windows. Grr.