16 ms·
QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
Hiya folks!
I'm John from the Developer Relations team at QNX. I'm a loooong time lurker of this forum and excited to make my first post.
I just wanted to let you know that we've kicked off a new program to start opening the doors to QNX like things used to be. Many of you probably used or tinkered with (the very open) QNX back in the day. You can now easily get a free non-commercial license to use the newest QNX. We've also just released some sample apps and a ready-to-go QNX 8.0 quick start target image for Raspberry Pi. So you can get QNX and the development tools for free now to learn, experiment, and build.
It's been a long time in the making, so I'm really excited to get to post about this first phase of the QNX Everywhere initiative. My team and management have open ears, so please share feedback about what more we can do to open things up, be more transparent, and get you what you need to create an awesome embedded QNX project.
Cheers!
- wrd83 2y agoI think the ship has sailed already. the people I know, who used QNX switched to linux for usability reasons. You can run linux on many workloads where QNX used to dominate, why bother then.
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- johndoe0815 2y agoTo add some details - the source code for QNX was available from 2007 until the takeover by RIM/Blackberry in 2010. So do you plan to offer access to QNX source code again in the future? https://www.qnx.com/news/pr_2471_1.html https://www.qnx.com/news/pr_2471_1.html
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoDon't hold me to timelines, but we're definitely headed in the direction of being more open and transparent. We're hearing that this is important to our customers and the community alike. Stay tuned!
- f1shy 2y agoBut then it will be clear that almost nothing was done in that time…
- nisten 2y agoThe stock is almost dead. Please just opensource it instead of taking all that to the grave with you. Just do it.
- Animats 2y agoI just looked. BB peaked around US$140 and is now around US$2. Financials are so bad it's amazing the doors are still open.[1] QNX is a great technology, but nobody who acquired it knew what to do with it. [1] https://www.bing.com/entitydetails?q=BB+stock&wt=FinanceGenericL3TabModule&ocid=ansMSNMoney11&qid=a1o79c&t=Stock.a1o79c.BB.r6dwor&src=b_l3tsubp&id=a1o79c&l3=L3_Analysis https://www.bing.com/entitydetails?q=BB+stock&wt=FinanceGene...
- Animats 2y agoLooking at those numbers, you have to be thinking about what happens to QNX if (when?) RIM/Blackberry goes bust. You need license terms that survive bankruptcy. "We can terminate at any time" does not work in this situation.
- balou23 2y agoSo from what I gather, this is the third time you want to be open and transparent with your sources?
- Onavo 2y agoYou are not John "patent troll" Chen right? Your ceo suck
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- java-man 2y agoThis is a good move! In my opinion, any platform should be available for free for any non-commercial purpose. This is how people get started, and this is how the platform proliferates. I might even suggest going a bit further: provide some limited support for non-commercial users, for example, make it super-easy to file a bug. But otherwise, it's a win-win for both the free tier (students, hobbyists) and the corporate.
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoThis is great feedback, thanks! I absolutely want to find ways to provide some support -- a bug portal is a fantastic idea. For now we're accepting issue reports though gitlab.com/qnx.
- VoxPelli 2y agoEg the Business Source License and the Functional Source License makes it always available for non-commercial use
- tlack 2y agoKudos on your bold undertaking! I've been a side-lined QNX admirer for some time, though not a potential user in most cases. A good next step would be a series of blog posts where the author takes on common types of enthusiast projects and unpacks how QNX's strengths can be applied in those scenarios.
- steve_adams_86 2y agoI’d love to see this. I’m curious about QNX but at a loss as to how it could benefit me as someone who tinkers with robotics at home. I also work for a non-profit org which does coastal margin research. We have several people working on custom hardware. Could this benefit us?
- bregma 2y agoStart with https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/-/blob/master/pdf/qnx_book.pdf https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/-/blob/master/pdf/qnx... as an intro to tinkering at home.
- throw0101a 2y agoDoes it come on a 1.44MB floppy (image)? * http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html * https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo * https://crackberry.com/heres-how-qnx-looked-1999-running-144mb-floppy https://crackberry.com/heres-how-qnx-looked-1999-running-144...
- ilhuadjkv 2y agoWait, http://127.1/ http://127.1/ In the browser in the crackberry video what the....
- Jtsummers 2y ago127.1 is the same as 127.0.0.1. 0 bytes are inserted based on the following: x -> 0.0.0.x x.y -> x.0.0.y x.y.z -> x.y.0.z
- bryanlarsen 2y agoBut sometimes 127.1 means 127.1.0.0/16. For example in the output of `netstat -rn` on MacOS.
- Jtsummers 2y agoGood to know. I was also coming back in to edit my comment and write that my x -> 0.0.0.x was technically wrong and the same for the others. If you stick to only single-byte values then what I wrote was correct but if the values span multiple bytes they fill in the missing 0s appropriately, as in: 256 -> 0.0.1.0 1.256 -> 1.0.1.0
- elcritch 2y agoSimilar rules apply to ipv6 addresses as well.
- jandrese 2y ago
- altairprime 2y agoFor QNX 8.0, here’s a saved-you-five-minutes direct link to the developer terms associated with noncommercial use: https://support7.qnx.com/download/download/51624/BB_QNX_Development_License_Non-Commercial_License_Class_v6_2024-11-1.pdf https://support7.qnx.com/download/download/51624/BB_QNX_Deve... (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice. This is not a comprehensive review, assessment, or summary of possible interpretations of that license. Seek professional counsel from a lawyer before acting on anything stated below.) These terms open with a ‘user did not have an opportunity to review and agree before binding themselves, their business, and/or their institution’ clause that may well wholly invalidate the entire document in the US, so please review these with your lawyer before use, so that your usage is not put at risk due to legalese overreach. Academics, only students and faculty of your institution qualify, and your usage under this license will be viewed by your legal team as you signing a binding agreement on behalf of your employer; make sure you’re not exposed to liability through open source contributors or at risk of being fired for misrepresenting yourself as a signing authority for your institution. Cloud users, your license is restricted to AWS per their terms; use on GCP, Heroku, or any other server instance not under your personal contractual control may result in owing licensing fees. Only OSI definitions of “Open Source” are permissible here; this disqualifies anyone licensing software under a restrictive non-commercial license from making use of the QNX non-commercial license, as per OSI, all such restrictions are not “open source”. Social apps are excluded by the “high risk” clause, which prohibits any use under these terms to develop applications that could harm society. Take care not to create viral applications that violate this clause. They collect and retain all serial numbers identifiable on all hardware you use in association with this product. Your noncommercial license may be severed unconditionally at any time without recourse, regardless of whether you have faithfully complied with the terms; at which time you may be compelled under contract to provide an undefined ‘certification’ of indeterminate cost that you deleted all QNX code provided to you. Stay safe, folks.
- gmueckl 2y agoSince when are social apps high risk? The high risk clause is clearly targeted at applications that have safety requirements (IEC 61508, ISO 26262 etc.). A crashing Twitter client won't injure or kill anyone.
- mech422 2y agoWill Photon be available as well ?
- 0x457 2y agoThis isn't an OS meant for desktops.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThere are many uses for graphical UIs outside general purpose desktops.
- 0x457 2y agoThat's why I said it isn't meant for desktop [where you would play games via proton].
- bigfatkitten 2y agoPhoton nonetheless made for an outstanding desktop.
- 0x457 2y agoWait hold on, I'm a moron that read photon (the UI of QNX) as proton (valve thingy). Disregard my message.
- speed_spread 2y agoIt used to be desktop-friendly enough to develop on. It's not a purely embedded OS.
- 0x457 2y agoI wouldn't call it desktop-friendly. Yeah, you could install and develop for QNX on it, but that was pretty much all you could do on it? Definitely won't be playing any video games on it.
- CyberDildonics 2y agoReinventing QNX will always be seen as cutting edge.
- peppertree 2y ago20 years too late but ok.
- ok123456 2y agoAnd about a month after the RT Linux patches were put in the kernel master.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoAgreed, a walled garden is still a walled garden... Even a $12 SoC is no longer resource constrained with a stripped minimal Linux kernel. QNX missed their launch window decades ago...
- f1shy 2y agoThe just bought a cow and wanted to milk to death. RIM is just a slow company to react.
- foolswisdom 2y agoFor anyone who (like me) was confused at what this is, it's a Unix like OS for embedded systems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
- simlevesque 2y agoThey are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoI think we're at something like 235 millions cars on the road today with QNX inside. The volume blows my mind. We're also hiding inside lots of healthcare products, industrial control systems, etc. There's lots of interesting key differences between something based on Linux, for example, and QNX. Worth digging into if you're interested in these things. My colleague wrote a short ebook and the intro has a good summary: https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/-/tree/master/pdf https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/-/tree/master/pdf
- WillAdams 2y agoThere is however also TRON: https://ethw.org/Milestones:TRON_Real-time_Operating_System_Family,_1984 https://ethw.org/Milestones:TRON_Real-time_Operating_System_... which was demoed running on an 80186 with _multiple_ windows running videos w/o dropping a frame. Described as "The most installed operating system in the world": https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/the-most-popular-operating-system-in-the-world-31855.html https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/the-most-popular-operatin... Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department viewed the Japanese plan to place it on all computers in their educational system as anti-competitive. Really wish it was available for the Raspberry Pi.
- AstroJetson 2y agoThere is a micro kernel version that runs on RP2040 would that work for you?
- steve_adams_86 2y agoWhat would be a good hobbyist project to learn QNX?
- f1shy 2y agoNone, I guess. It is just a Posix OS, with not the brightest future.
- 0x457 2y agoMaybe not the brightest future, but it's more than just a POSIX OS.
- f1shy 2y agowhat are the extras? RT can also linux.
- 0x457 2y agoFor starters, QNX has IPC that works over IP-capable networks, which makes things like High Availibility much easier to implement. Drivers are in user-land and can be restarted at runtime. Probably more, but it's been awhile since I used it. A lot of it comes from QNX having a micro-kernel. > RT can also linux. PREEMPT_RT was merged in september of this year[1]. I terms of "hard real-time" with PREEMPT_RT scheduler still not completely deterministic like in QNX. [1]: Note that you could have turned linux in "somewhat" hard real-time with or without PREEMPT_RT patches for user-land application.
- f1shy 2y ago>> QNX has IPC that works over IP-capable networks I do not know what you mean. IPC over IP is at least 50 years old, and today can be done with ANY POSIX system, as it is part of the Standard! >> Drivers are in user-land and can be restarted at runtime. Probably more, but it's been awhile since I used it. A lot of it comes from QNX having a micro-kernel. And QNX is as microkernel as MacOs Honesty at this point I don’t know if you are trolling or being sarcastic or you really never used linux. You absolutely can work with drivers in userspace in Linux (that is standard practice for driver development in linux) and has absolutely nothing, not even remotely, to do with the kernel architecture. >> still not completely deterministic like in QNX. First we have to admit that RT term is loosy, is used lousy and is full of it. Specially when somebody says “completely deterministic” there is just not a complete deterministic thing in a computer. Bottom line (a) RT Linux is more than enough for anything in the real world. (b) I haven't used QNX lately, but as I did, the only thing deterministic was the “yeah… this box has to be rebooted once a week, or QNX will just hang”
- masijo 2y agoI need to know if it comes with Photon microGUI! Please, lord, let it happen...
- wmf 2y agoPhoton was dropped years ago. They use a completely new graphics architecture now.
- AceJohnny2 2y agoMy previous company, which made high-availability (Active/Standby) routers for mobile networks, used QNX as the OS. I remain impressed by its capabilities. My memory is rusty, but we ran QNX on the control-plane processors, and it natively allowed launching processes on remote processors over the internal network of the router. That is: their low-level IPC was IP-capable. QNX's IPC was essential for our HA failover functionality. Also, device drivers as user-space processes that you could restart on crash was great (we were developing our network drivers, so this would occasionally happen). Also, better respect for devices actually showing up in the /dev/ tree, unlike Linux where network devices are a notable exception. One funny story, I once spent days debugging an issue which turned out to be due to me accidentally marking const the return values of some IPC, which caused my process to crash in between QNX's IPC function and mine! Whatever level of debugger (C/userspace) I was using at the time could not catch the error ^^;
- ahoka 2y agoI also worked on routes for mobile networks. Everything ran Linux, especially the control plane. Line cards were also linux, but the only task they had to do is to program the ASICS as the control plane told them to do. None of those features are relevant, you could do the IPC over HTTP or whatever you wanted.
- niutech 2y ago> it natively allowed launching processes on remote processors over the internal network of the router This was already possible in CP/NET (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M#CP/NET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M#CP/NET) or CP/J with JUNET [https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/JUNET_(CP/J) https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/JUNET_(CP/J)].
- MichaelZuo 2y agoFor attracting more developers can you compile a comarison table with the benefits of QNX versus competitors? The existing information out there is of questionable reliability and probably out of date too...
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoThis is a good blog post idea. I'll get it on our backlog.
- jsheard 2y agoTIL the Blackberry brand still exists in this space. Similar to Nokia I suppose, the consumer side no longer exists but the enterprise side is still going.
- baq 2y agoI don't want to create an account just to know if it'll work on a pi zero w, will it?
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoRight now, in the Pi family, only the Pi 4 on the BCM2711.
- Jtsummers 2y agohttps://blackberry.qnx.com/en/developers/board-support-packages https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/developers/board-support-packa... - no need to create an account, BSPs listed here and you can filter by several fields.
- myself248 2y agoAs I was scrolling down, I saw all the TI Jacinto and Sitara dev boards, and I wondered if there might be one for the Beaglebone. And indeed, scroll a bit further! That's convenient, as I have a lot more of those sitting around than I do Pis at the moment.
- SushiHippie 2y agoMy experience looking at the page as someone who has never heard of QNX: First there is so much text that wants to tell me how great this software/tooling/resources is, without telling me what exactly it is. As I still wanted to know what it is, after reading your comment here†, I clicked on the front page https://blackberry.qnx.com/en https://blackberry.qnx.com/en which has a concise introduction "Real-Time OS and Software for Embedded Systems Launch your critical embedded systems faster with our commercial RTOS, hypervisor, development tools and services." An RTOS for embedded system, aha! That would be valuable information on the QNX Everywhere page. (Real-Time OS / RTOS isn't mentioned once) Then I found the resources section nearly at the bottom, which has quick start guide, where I can see what I will get when I sign up for a free license and that would be exactly what I (as someone who has no clue what to expect from QNX) would want to see at the top, after a short introduction to what it is and why I want to try it out. Maybe this page is more intended for people who are already aware of QNX, but if you intend to "catch" new people I really would recommend you to reorder/simplify this page, by putting relevant information (like a short introduction, why I would want to try it and a quick start guide) at the top instead of a wall of marketing text. † this comment was first under a comment from the author, which now got moved to the HN post text
- f1shy 2y agoBad product, bad company, bad marketing. Consistent.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoYou'd be one of the first people I've seen that doesn't like QNX itself. Normally people complain about the licensing or RIM. What issues do you have?
- f1shy 2y agoLack of drivers, slow, not full of bugs, but some annoying, which they wont fix (there was a month ago a thread here about it).
- 2y ago
- armaautomotive 2y agoThis is very interesting and I'm happy to see this. It's probably not relevant but i'm remembering reaching out 20+ years ago for a license to use in a Darpa GC team and getting a quote for 16K which made it unavailable for our make shift team but I have a tremendous amount of respect for the company and their work to build QNX. I will probably be looking into this for something in the future.
- farseer 2y agoWith linux options in embedded space aplenty, who would want to move to a propriety os? QNX's big brother Vxworks has already been pushed out of most consumer embedded devices and is now limited to space probes and critical medical equipment. I just don't see a future for QNX anywhere.
- NexRebular 2y agoNot everything has to be linux. It's good to have options for avoiding monoculturalization.
- eikenberry 2y agoIt's not a real option (to Linux) though at it is still governed by a non-free license.
- EasyMark 2y agonot everyone cares about that. They want something they know and something that works for them, not everything has to be FOSS
- elcritch 2y agoDealing with Linux can be a PITA. Once you get a base system up you still need to roll a bunch of our own stuff. Do you use System unit or systemd, etc. The driver api's are pretty unstable. I make embedded linux device and I'm curious if QNX could make things easier, especially for long term stability.
- mcflubbins 2y agoThere's BSD too (e.g. Playstation, Apple Airport, Some POS devices and printers)
- smarx007 2y agoFor real-time systems, QNX should be compared to FreeRTOS, CMSIS/RTX, VxWorks, or, if you after the new cool stuff, Zephyr, perhaps, but not Linux.
- beardyw 2y ago> Many of you probably used or tinkered with (the very open) QNX back in the day. Well I didn't and it was not easy to understand what it is from your website. Wikipedia came to my rescue. You may want to consider that.
- j1mmie 2y agoI'm interested in building a Unity game for Raspberry Pi 4. Does QNX have good graphics support for RPi currently?
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoThat's awesome! It's decent, yes. The starter image comes with a graphical app launcher you can check out. I'll poke the team about releasing the source for that launcher soon (I think they wanted to clean it up so it's a good sample).
- Animats 2y agoIf only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for three years when working on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. All of that went away after the Harman acquisition of QNX in 2004. Then, in 2007, QNX went open source. You could even look at the microkernel. It wasn't openly licensed, but you could look inside and build it. In 2010, RIM acquired QNX, and, with no warning, closed the source. All open source development related to QNX ceased, and QNX lost all credibility in the community. So QNX shot itself in the foot. Twice. Note the contractual terms.[1] "TERMINATION. This Agreement and licenses granted hereunder may be terminated by either Party upon written notice to the other Party". QNX can pull the plug at any time. Since they've done so twice in the past, there's a good chance that will happen again. Now, if QNX is serious about this, the way to go is to use the licensing model Epic uses for Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is behind most AAA game titles. The basic terms are that you can download the source and use it for anything you want, and there's no charge until you get the first $1 million in revenue from your product. Then Epic takes a 5% royalty.[2] This has been extremely successful for Epic. There's not much of a piracy problem, because if your game gets enough revenue to matter, it has enough visibility that their licensing people will notice. Meanwhile, there's a large pool of people using Unreal Engine. That's the way to do it if you want more adoption of QNX. Take the Epic term sheet to your lawyers and management. And have them take a look at Unreal Engine's revenue growth vs. QNX. As I once told a QNX sales rep, your problem isn't that you're being pirated. It's that you're being ignored. [1] http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=51624 http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=51624 [2] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/UnrealEngine/faq/UnrealEngineEndUserLicenseAgreementv12.1-21f8b3b79e10a92a7dfb02aa051af3df67ff6ce3.pdf https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/UnrealEngine/faq/UnrealEngineE...
- Tomte 2y agoFor everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640
- mikercampbell 2y agoWith all due respect, I’ve never spent so long clicking through a website trying to figure out what it actually was. What is QNX haha
- mikercampbell 2y agoI mean, I figured it out from HN but still.
- Animats 2y agoQNX is a microkernel-based real time operating system. The kernel is tiny; it was about 60KB (not MB) twenty years ago. All the kernel does is message passing, timers, CPU dispatching, and memory allocation. Everything else is in user space, including file systems. Everything is a message, rather than being a file. Messaging works like a function call - you send a block of data to another process, wait, and get a reply back. Processes which receive messages act like servers - they have a thread or threads waiting for incoming requests, and when a request comes in, it's handled and a reply is sent back. It's a microservices architecture. Unlike Linux, it's a fast microservices architecture. Message passing and CPU dispatching are integrated. When a process sends a message to a service process, the sender blocks. (Timeouts are available.) If the service process isn't busy, control immediately transfers to the service process without a trip through the CPU dispatcher. When the service process replies, the reverse happens, and control goes back to the original sender. With most inter-process communication systems, there's queuing delay for this kind of operation. QNX got this right. This is the core insight behind QNX. Yes, there is message passing copying overhead. In practice it's under 10%. I've sent video through the message system. Copying is less of a problem than you might expect, because, with today's large CPU caches, the data being copied is probably warm and in cache. All this is real-time aware. Higher priority processes get their messages through first. If you call a service, it inherits the caller's priority until it replies. This prevents priority inversion, where a high priority process calls a low priority one and gets preempted by lower priority work. This works so well that I was able to do compiles and web browsing on a single-CPU machine that was also running a robot vehicle. There's a tool for building boot images. You put in the kernel, a standard utility process called "proc", and whatever else you need available at startup. For deeply embedded systems, the application might go in the boot image. It's all read-only and can execute from ROM if needed, which is good for applications where you really, really want startup to always work. Files and file systems are optional. For systems with files, there are file system and disk drivers to put in the boot image. They run in user space. There's a standard startup program set that creates a Unix-type environment at boot time. This is all done in user space. The file system is accessed by message passing. System calls look like POSIX. Most of them are implemented in a library, not the kernel. Service processes do the work. When an application calls POSIX "read", the library makes an interprocess function call to the file system or network service server. Program loading ("exec") is done in user space. The boot image can contain .so files. "Exec" is done by a .so file that loads the image. So the kernel doesn't have to worry about executable format, and program loading is done by untrusted code. Because it uses POSIX, most command line UNIX and Linux programs will compile and run. That's QNX's big advantage over L4. L4 is a good microkernel, but it's so stripped down it's just a hypervisor. Typically, people run Linux on top of L4, so all the bloat comes back. There is no paging at the OS level. That would kill real-time. There's a paging to disk library that can be used by programs such as compilers with big transient memory needs, but most programs don't use it. The effect is that responsiveness is very consistent. I miss using QNX desktop. There's no lag. So that's an overview. Microkernel done right.
- Retr0id 2y agoI was excited to see "free", and even more excited to read "like things used to be", but after reading more closely I see it's merely free-as-in-gratis, as opposed to the more interesting definitions.
- fauria 2y agoIn case you are wondering: QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system owned by BlackBerry, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. From https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx
- fulafel 2y agoThe "unix-like" characterisation seems it might be be from the Wikipedia QNX article and repeated by a lot of web content. But it doesn't seem really accurate to me and it's not used by their own web site or documentation. It seems quite opposite to Unix in a lot of ways even though it has some API compatibility.
- fauria 2y agoYou should update the Wikipedia article in that case.
- bitwize 2y agoIt's got a POSIX API layer, but it's about as "unix-like" as Haiku.
- bregma 2y agoHow does it seem like the opposite? It's POSIX.
- fulafel 2y agoCheck out eg this paper about the OS: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.pdf https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.p... Yes it has some source-level Unix compatible app-facing interfaces, but we don't call the Steam OS/Deck a Windows-like either. (eg Windows NT was also POSIX certified)
- bregma 2y agoI'd definitely call the Steam Deck unix-like, although GNU/Linux is less POSIX-conformant than QNX is. Source-level and command-level compatibility is what makes something "unix-like". Paying a hefty annual license fee to the Open Group is what makes your OS "Unix". I don't believe there is any benefit to BlackBerry paying such a fee so they can slap their logo on their web site since the US DoD is not a target market for them. Nevertheless, arguing that something is not "unix-like" just because it's very much like Unix is, well, odd.
- hacknews20 2y agoGreat. Long over due, maybe too late.
- initramfs 2y agoI found this a while back. Unsure if it's related https://github.com/vocho/openqnx https://github.com/vocho/openqnx (I prefer 32-bit because most applications don't need more than 4GB RAM, but I guess 64-bit could be useful too)
- bexsella 2y agoI’ve had a lot of experience in developing on QNX over the years, and with each successive year, the call to migrate to Linux got stronger. The day to day developer experience is great, you can very easily setup a CMake toolchain and bypass the need for QNX’s Momentics, which if you’re just developing for QNX is something you will want to do. But, in my experience the driver support simply isn’t there, and that became painful. A fair few major board manufacturers treat QNX integration as a complete afterthought, and at a point you start to feel that this is directly related to RIM’s decision to shutdown source access to QNX. I’ve since left that company, but I imagine there is still a call to use Linux.
- bregma 2y agoI use CMake for QNX all the time. It just works, out of the box.
- brynet 2y agoI don't have great expectations for this, we've been rug pulled before. https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-once-again/ https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-onc... They then killed the self-hosted QNX entirely, no downloadable .ISOs after 6.5. No working toolchain, so porting software became difficult, pkgsrc abandoned. They are completely noncommittal, nothing short of actually open-sourcing it, MIT/BSD, would convince me otherwise.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoI wonder how much DBus (the Inter-Process-Communication (IPC) standard Linux desktops have been based around) is baked into QNX & instrumental to it! Maybe I can find out now? https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf or https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/vehicle-cybersecurity-the-jeep-hack-and-beyond/ https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/vehicle-cybersecurity-the-... That was such a time. It's sad that it was a security panic, to me, because there was incredible promise there... All of the cars infotainment, windows, interior lighting, HVAC, all these things are just DBus services hosted on QNX? And I can just connect to my car & modify them, in some cases even over the air? QNX & DBus could have been a huge selling point, could have been such an awesome way to debundle the car from its infotainment. If only. Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place. Seeing how monolithic versus networked QNX is in general would be fascinating; is there one or two QNX hosts & lots of devices, or so the story more distributed that that?
- RandomThoughts3 2y agoDbus is a (not very good) userland message bus. QNX is a realtime kernel. I don't really understand what you mean by: > Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoMaybe it's just the Uconnect infotainment system. The PDF I linked above is the in-depth Jeep hack run-down, and a huge huge huge part of it is playing around with the many many many many DBus services. Is QNX just a kernel, no userland for it? I would have assumed it might include higher level offerings, including I would guess, to be helpful, some cross-system messaging options. Until now it's been impossible to guess. But yeah, it's quite likely this DBus stuff is just Dodge's repurposing of (not fantastic but reasonably ok and well known) messaging tech, DBus, layered atop.
- detaro 2y ago
- sriram_sun 2y agoIs there an eBPF equivalent for QNX? Also, with the real-time linux patch (which has been mainlined now), I'm able to run C++ ROS2 control loops @ 1ms down to even 250us on commodity off the shelf i3 and i5 hardware with dedicated cores. I've worked on vxWorks, QNX and Linux and I found the pace of development using Linux the fastest.
- craftkiller 2y agoWouldn't that not make sense for QNX? eBPF is for running code in kernel space but QNX is a microkernel. The microkernel approach would be to just run another userspace program like any other program.
- sriram_sun 2y agoGood point! I was look at it from a users pov. Let's say I have a BPF script for monitoring a set of processes - their disk, network and CPU with some filters on specific messages. Now can I use it in qnx or what's the equivalent? It can run in userspace for all I care.
- wkat4242 2y agoOh cool, does this also include the unfortunately discontinued desktop version of QNX? I've always wanted to try out a real time OS
- eikenberry 2y agoWhy not real-time Linux? It's even been accepted into mainline now.
- wkat4242 2y agoIs that a true RTOS though? I thought it was only a partial implementation
- rw_grim 2y ago> Develop open-source software (OSS) that is interoperable with QNX software, provided you make the resulting OSS publicly available at no charge. Even the GPL doesn't have this restriction...
- nrclark 2y ago@JohnAtQNX can you remove the "everybody needs an account" restriction from your website downloads, and also remove the license mechanism from qcc? That would go a long way towards encouraging hobbyists to try it out. Your money comes from high-volume licensing deals, where you presumably get a per-unit license fee. That revenue stream is jeopardized by pissing off the CI/CD teams that have to support QNX product lines.
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoHiya! We've discussed how to make that work. It's good to hear the same thing from an outside voice. I'll bring it back to the table to inch it along. Thanks!
- jiggawatts 2y agoThis is in the same category as VPN vendors that require a login to download their VPN client. When you're a consultant or a random sysops person in a huge enterprise, that's infuriating. There is zero benefit to the vendor doing this, nobody can ever benefit from "pirating" a free component that can't be used without another paid component. I've permanently blacklisted vendors for pulling this kind of thing. Most recently Crowdstrike: I was up all weekend doing emergency server rollbacks and they had the nerve to publish critical information behind a login! Tip: If your company ever uses the word "you" in any communication of any kind, then that company has made a serious error of understanding. There is no "you" at an enterprise customer! There's teams of many people each, and not all of them are even aware of who has an account and for what.
- wolrah 2y agoI will echo this. Back around 2000 I recall getting a QNX live CD with a magazine. That was the ultimate in low friction, I didn't even know QNX was a thing but a copy of it landed in my lap so I gave it a shot. At the time it didn't support my sound card or modem so it was dead in the water for me but it was an interesting experience that earned the platform a near mythical spot in my mind for decades following. Keep friction low if you want people to try your thing.
- 2y ago
- ksaj 2y agoPlease consider bringing back some legacy software. When I was learning computers, we learned on QNX (poor kids younger than I started on Windows!) and there were some very interesting software packages that I think don't exist anymore. For example, QPaint. What made it interesting, is that you could save your image in a few image formats, or as a C header for inclusion in a C program. It could also import/export Logo generated images. There was also a software voice module. I assume it had different voices because when it was demoed to us, it was a robot guy voice, but later there was an educational graphical interface that looked like a girl's face, and it of course had a female voice when it spoke. It would be strange to have two things do exactly the same thing, so I suspect they were the same software for speech. I think it was simply invoked with 'speak'. We used to prank other students by speak -something- /dev/tty.... where the tty pointed to other people's nodes on the server network. Fun times!
- GuestFAUniverse 2y agoTypical marketing euphemism: "Built-in Support for Open-Source Components" Read: we take free things thankfully, but we don't live by the same standards.
- vundercind 2y agoQNX and BeOS were the only operating systems I tried in the early '00s that could make old single-core mid-90s Pentiums feel excellent and snappy to use. Far, far better than any Windows version, or Linux. I assume it's mostly scheduler stuff and much better multimedia stacks, in both cases. I always hoped the operating systems of the future would feel more like that. Closest we've got is probably iOS and it cheats by killing processes all the time. The future is lame.
- Aurelius108 2y agoAlthough they’re cheating, I give them props for trying. I abandoned Android when even Samsung didn’t make an honest effort to make their phones responsive. It’s nice that Apple consistently values responsiveness because then Google, Samsung and Microsoft have some incentive to address their bloated products.
- Baeocystin 2y agoI non-ironically dream for the day that a modern computer is as snappy booting as my old Commodore 128, as fast to reset, and as responsive to all keystrokes.
- smallstepforman 2y agoBeOS was “pervasively” multithreaded, which in non marketing speak means the kernel did not have a giant lock (since it was designed as a many core system from day #1). Its contemporary OS’s at the time had a giant single lock. BeOS also had 750ms preemption interval (or was it 3ms, I dont remember) while Linux and Windows had 20ms, then later 10ms, so this is what you fealt. A couple of decades later and most OS’s matched the finer locking granuality in kernel space, minus the premption interval (argument being throughput vs latency, since scripted OS benchmarks measure overall throughput, not GUI responsiveness). A perfect example is media buffers that benefit from smaller buffer sizes, at the cost of less throughput. Musicians notice better responsiveness in BeOS, hence the monicker “Media OS”. Also, in GUI space, the BeOS/Haiku app server still offers a more distributed workload compared to other desktop environments. Every windows is assigned its own thread, the app gets its own thread, and the app and application server have 1 thread per app and window to ensure they are not blocked waiting for slow app message parsing. So minimum BeOS app with graphical “Hello World” window is 4 threads. So even if the app is busy, the rest of the system still feels responsive. All this comes at a throughput cost, as well as an app development complexity cost, especially for ported apps. Haiku needs to marshall Qt/Gtk/toolkit messages from many windows into a single message queue to prevent multithreaded bugs from popping up (since in their original environment, all app message loopers were not multithreaded). This marshalling needs additional lock/unlock calls in Haiku even when not needed (messages to same window). Haiku native apps, on the other hand, are smooth as ice. See this screenshot of Medo video editor where all windows are working in their own threads (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smallstepforman/Medo/refs/heads/main/Docs/Medo.jpeg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smallstepforman/Medo/refs/...). On modern systems, this app is smooth as ice, which for a video editor is heresy. Disclaimer: I wrote the linked Haiku app.
- justin66 2y ago@JohnAtQNX the way to put the rug-pulling concerns to bed is to license all the source code under the ISC License, BSD 2-clause License, or MIT License. This would certainly have an impact once that was done. Of course I cannot speak to what that would do to your software business...
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoI hear it loud and clear. We're certainly in the early days of this initiative, but as things progress I'll make sure to bring up source code licensing as a community concern.
- kragen 2y agoThings aren't going to progress if you are asking people to risk you rugging them a third time. They have alternative operating systems to invest their time in that are safer.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- idatum 2y agoI recall running QNX on my iPAQ handheld, sometime in the late 2000s. It was pre-iPhone, so seeing a Unix-like O/S on a handheld device back then was quite a treat.
- Baeocystin 2y agoI still remember being blown away by the single-floppy QNX demo that included a web browser. It was so fast. I wish you guys the best. I can only imagine what a gordian knot it must be getting all the legal ducks in a row to actually open things up. Like others have mentioned, after two rug pulls, we're all wary, but there's so much to enjoy about QNX, I hope you manage to get traction with this.
- bigiain 2y agoThat QNX demo floppy was _magical_ back in the late 90's, revealing just how fast things _could_ feel on a 486 DX2 or DX4 CPU compared to the same use on Linux/Windows at the time. I've always had a somewhat positive view of QNX since then, but intermediate ownership and open/commercial status changes always kept me away from it. Sadly, this "opening" is familiar enough, and previous experience lead me to believe unless it gets a truly open GPL license and a large enough FOSS community to maintain a fork, this'll just get rug pulled again...
- VoxPelli 2y agoWe need to start treating “non-commercial” as the ambivalent term that it is. Eg: All “non-profit” and “personal” use likely isn’t necessarily “non-commercial”, but those two can be easily identified based on who it is that makes use of the software. So what is the definition of “non-commercial”? Nothing in itself. Eg. Creative Commons elaborates a lot on what it means in that context: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...
- kmbfjr 2y agoWhat I need to know is, does it come with Solitaire using the “Giants of Computing” card deck? Because if it does, that is worth it right there. We ran QNX for ASI statistical multiplexing in TV. I would always fire up a game while waiting for logs.
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoI wonder if we could get this running again!
- parl_match 2y agoWhy would I use QNX for any project when RTOS Linux is mature? Why would I care? So you can rug-pull license changes? Should I use it because it's cute? It's academically interesting? Sure, I've used QNX in the past for those reasons. The next time I pick a soc for a project, and its associated bsp, I'm not going to look for QNX. I'm either going to use whatever freertos distro they include or install the android build tools so i can push an apk to its wackity ass android fork. I suppose if i was doing automotive or medical, the story would be different. But I know the space well enough to know that you have many competitors all nipping at your heels, and with the linux rtos changes, it's not going to get better. This is not 2010. There are options. While QNX has languished behind obscure and annoying licensing requirements, literally dozens of companies have been developing alternatives. Some of them are quite big, and in some cases, have gone to space. At this point, if you want QNX to be taken seriously, you're going to have to do better than "start opening the doors to QNX like things used to be". I'll take it one step further - if it's not completely open source for commercial use, I have no interest in using it. I could be enticed to put up with an Epic-style license if the associated tooling and bsp support was worth my time. I have zero interest in paying a license to get started. Again - not 2010. Your product has been commoditized and now it's a curiosity. The only way it gets enough active development and adoption is if its a community effort.
- Dinux 2y agoAmen
- gosub100 2y agoYou would use it if you wanted to get a job doing RTOS dev and wanted to show you had some skin in the game.
- throwaway313373 2y agoI don't think that "skin in the game" means what you think it means.
- gosub100 2y ago
- angellamae 2y ago[dead]
- angellamae 2y ago[dead]
- rbanffy 2y agoThanks, John. QNX has always been one of my favourite OSs (I still have my Blackberry Q10) since I learned C on it in the mid 1980’s. A full-featured multi-tasking OS running from a 360K floppy on a PC/XT is not something easily forgotten. I’m glad the company is making this investment again.
- ConanRus 2y agowhy didn't they just open it for all with a proper license? as soon as you're move toward a commercial product with qnx you're immediately own them money. and no money with linux. who will us qnx on these terms?
- upintord 2y agoAny tips on loading onto a Kyocera duraforce? tia
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoFool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me 3 or more times, and I'd need to get my head checked for possible brain damage. I feel bad for saying this because probably someone out there spent energy building political capital in the organisation and has stuck their neck out a bit to make this happen, but yeah, I'll have a look and a play, but no way would I invest serious energy into the QNX platform with these current terms. Not that you're missing anything. I'm no wizard.
- marcodiego 2y agoOh that's nice. But you know... There's a free (as in freedom) OS called Linux that now is also realtime. QNX is interesting for a few less cases now.
- Beijinger 2y agoReminds me of this guy: https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/qnx-7-desktop/ https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/qnx-7-desktop/
- Alakrintis 2y agoThe same guy wrote the QNX Raspberry Pi book https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/ https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/
- Abismith 2y ago[dead]
- michrassena 2y agoI hope the QNX can fix their antiquated password process on this site. Apparently I still had an account from the last time they opened things up, and I asked for a password reset. I received a six character temporary password by email and used that log in. Then when I changed the password (which wasn't prompted for when I logged in, I had to hunt down the change password option), I was limited to alphanumerics and 20 characters. Edit: I'll also add that the entire process of setting up an account, getting a license, granting yourself a license, then downloading the software center all just to download the Raspberry Pi image was a lot of roundabout steps for something I'm going to play around with on the weekend and never look at again. I know this is an exercise to gain customers, but still a hassle even for those familiar with the process. Ultimately it reads as if QNX is deathly afraid of giving something away.
- Havoc 2y agoFor the love of god put what the thing is into the first sentence. Still have no idea wth qnx is
- krapp 2y agoIf you don't already know, or can't even be bothered to read their linked site, you probably aren't the target audience.
- Woshiwuja 2y ago[dead]
- Havoc 2y ago> can't even be bothered to read their linked site, you probably aren't the target audience. People who are not the audience need to read it to determine that they don’t need to read it because they’re not the target audience? That’s your solution over them integrating “QNX is an embedded Os” into their opening paragraph? What a strange response to a rather simple hey could you be clearer request
- BenFranklin100 2y agoJohn, Would it be possible to get this installed on a BlackBerry Passport or Q10. The passport is my favorite phone of all time.
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoHmm, not today, but I love the sentiment! Of the BB10 line, Passport was also my favorite!
- xvilka 2y agoWe (Rizin) would love to improve QNX support of our FOSS reverse engineering and debugging framework. We already support[1][2][3][4] it, but can't reliably test. Would be awesome to have the QEMU image out of the box, just like Windows provides ready to use limited VMs for testing[5]. [1] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/tree/dev/librz/bin/format/qnx https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/tree/dev/librz/bin/format/... [2] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/blob/dev/librz/bin/p/bin_qnx.c https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/blob/dev/librz/bin/p/bin_q... [3] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/blob/dev/librz/debug/p/debug_qnx.c https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/blob/dev/librz/debug/p/deb... [4] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/tree/dev/subprojects/rzqnx https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/tree/dev/subprojects/rzqnx [5] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoYou should be able to use the free QNXE Everywhere license to spin up a QEMU VM with a few clicks in the IDE. I appreciate it would be easier of it was a single-click download like the Windows image though. I'll take that feedback. If I can help enable your QNX support in any other way, feel free to DM or message: qnxcommunityengagement at qnx dot com.
- qwerty456127 2y agoCool. If there's Photon, PhAb, and everything looks and feels the same like in QNX 6 I'm in. I couldn't even find the download button though. If registration is mandatory then I'm not interested.
- RachelF 2y agoBeen fooled by QNX before, a long time ago, and it cost us a lot. Never again. Go away now QNX, real-time Linux has won.
- faragon 2y agoWorking with QNX today is like working with 25 year old software: tiny community, few examples, lots of issues for which you end doing avoidance workarounds, etc. I would have more interest on it if being open source.
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoThis is what QNX Everywhere is all about -- opening the community, writing piles of examples and samples, and identifying and fixing the issues that add friction. The team and I have a massive backlog of fun directions to take this, and I'm excited to be getting started!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- graymatters 2y agoQNX is squeezed from above by Linux, especially as real time patches have finally been fully accepted. And from below by FreeRTOS and Zephyr. Current attempt to open source is a desperate move by QNX as their market share is disappearing. Why would anyone in their right mind step on the same landmine, called QNX, which already pulled a rug from under the developers feet once? Absolutely no trust in QNX ecosystem. Save yourself pain and aggregation. Don’t use QNX.
- bregma 2y agoThere are not any real time patches for Linux: there's only the low-latency kernel. Low-latency and realtime are different things. A lot of the time the two can appear superficially similar, until they don't and your airplane falls out of they sky. The realtime executives are not operating systems. Executives and operating systems are two different things. QNX is a realtime operating system. It addresses the niche of a realtime operating system that isn't being met by anything else out there, and has been doing so for 40 years, even if free versions for hobbyists haven't been available for many of those years. It's not about market share since that's always been there. It's about mindshare and given the comments here, that's obviously missing.
- eitland 2y agoA major upgraded was landed recently: https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/10/linux-6-12-real-time/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/10/linux-6-12-real-time/
- bregma 2y agoA preemptable kernel does not make Linux a realtime OS. A low-latency kernel does not make Linux a realtime OS. There are great things in their niches but when you need a realtime OS, Linux is still not going to be fit for purpose.
- Rochus 2y ago> Current attempt to open source is a desperate move by QNX as their market share is disappearing Are you sure they want to open source it? Is this just an assumption, or can you provide a reference? I actually tried to find out whether the source code of the kernel etc. is included in the free version they provide, but they require to install a license manager on my machine, so I stopped; and it doesn't look as if it was open-source when there is a license manager (would be very easy to get around).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Woshiwuja 2y ago[dead]
- billpg 2y agoI remember when QNX was going to be the OS for the first post-Commodore Amiga machines. Fun times. I'm old.
- kstrauser 2y agoWow, I’d forgotten about that but you’re right.
- 7thaccount 2y agoIt's interesting to think about what could have been.
- nbittich 2y ago> Obtaining the SDP involves the following steps: 1. Register for a myQNX account. 2. Request a free licence. 3. Download QNX Software Centre. 4. Install the SDP on your computer You lost me at step 1.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- znpy 2y agoHey, what iPIs are supported ? I have an old first-gen raspberry pi, would QNX work on that ?
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoNot today, but that would be fascinating to try!
- sgt 2y agoCan we still put QNX on a 1.44M floppy and boot from it?
- mcmisieck 2y agoYou can get 30-day trial, Partner or Academic license. So what's new exactly?
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoThe non-commercial QNX Everywhere license is always free and perpetual -- no renewals. Fully self-service and includes access to the full QNX SDP 8.0 for development & QNX targets.
- supermatt 2y ago15 years too late (since you last snatched QNX away from us), and with a license that you can revoke at any time. What are you blackberry folk smoking? I guess your "benevolence" is no coincidence given that real-time support was merged into the linux kernel a month ago...
- lcooper 2y agoYou should have done this 20y ago
- rustcleaner 2y agoGPL it or we pretend nothing has changed at all. No more indian-giving, put up or buy an ad!
- bastloing 2y agoThis would have been good 20 years ago, but now, nope.
- prima-facie 2y agoQNX is now largely irrelevant with the merging of the PREEMPT_RT patches in the mainline Linux kernel, starting with v6.12 which comes out in a week or two.
- elahav 2y agoI think people are looking at this announcement the wrong way. If you are a hobbyist who is happy with a free OS you currently use, asking yourself "what's in it for me?" then the answer is: probably nothing. But if you are interested in QNX, want to see what it can do, maybe try a project or learn how to write drivers for a microkernel-based OS, you now have a free option.
- 7thaccount 2y agoCan one install QNX as the main OS on a desktop? Or can I boot into the QNX desktop from a thumb drive?
- JohnAtQNX 2y agoIt depends on the machine, I suppose. For example, the Pi 4 quick start image works like this.. But this isn't a desktop environment out of the box. Mr @elahav has a Desktop window manager based on Screen that you can build and run. It's pretty cool and in a great state to be built upon! https://gitlab.com/elahav/screenwm https://gitlab.com/elahav/screenwm
- consultSKI 2y agoAwesome! I signed up for the BlackBerry PlayBook dev initiative at SXSW in 2012 and found the device and QNX to be amazing. It supported a bluetooth mouse YEARS before the iPad! But BB failed to capitalize and yet another great product failed to make it into the mainstream. Looking forward to it! Espcially now that you guys are "inside" several EVs if the rumors are true. Sign me up!
- consultSKI 2y ago>> BlackBerry reserves the right to change, modify, discontinue, or cancel any offer or program or any part thereof at any time and in its sole discretion, without notice to you. << Oh. Never mind. I thought you guys were serious this time. "As I once told a QNX sales rep, your problem isn't that you're being pirated. It's that you're being ignored." — https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago"... plus there's an RPi image" Maybe. But there is no direct link to an RPi image. It's layer upon layer of agreements and consents. Not simple. Too much reading. I think I still have a tarball of the QNX source code from circa 2008.
- MrPaulz 2y agoI worked with it in the early 2000's when it was free; though the work was for QNX itself so they would have provided a license for the duration of development regardless. I am curious how it has evolved since then.