BeNews: Exclusive Preview: QNX RtP

[ Thanks to mike for this link.
]

“QNX OS is well-known for running everything from medical
hardware to satellites and spacecraft. QSSL, the company which
develops QNX, have decided after nearly 20 years to adapt their
product for the PC desktop market with a new and improved
implementation of the QNX RealTime Platform (RtP), which is based
on the Neutrino microkernel and powered by the Photon 2.0 windowing
environment (RtP is currently under closed Beta). Since QNX RtP
will be free for personal use in the very near future, this BeNews
preview will see how QNX RtP compares to BeOS and to free Linux
systems.“

“Just as Be uses the buzzword “Media OS”, QNX uses the buzzwords
“real time OS” and “microkernel.” The BeOS kernel is nearly a
microkernel, but isn’t quite there: A microkernel includes only a
small set of core services within the kernel, including thread
services, message passing, mutexes, condition variables,
semaphores, signals, and scheduling. The kernel can be extended by
dynamically plugging in service-providing processes, such as file
systems, networking, POSIX message queues, and device drivers. This
modularity speeds the boot process and offers good memory
protection and easy upgradability. It is also the exact opposite of
the Linux kernel, which is “monolithic” (everything is built into
the kernel, hence the need for re-compilation when you add/remove
hardware).”

“The QNX Neutrino kernel offers superior real-time response.
With features like multitasking, threads, priority-driven
preemptive scheduling, synchronization, and fast context switching
(0.55 µsec on a Pentium III), the RTOS provides serious
realtime performance. By real time, we mean that a command will be
executed in the time it is expected e.g. immediately (but this is
also scheduled by the programmer), no matter what the conditions
are.”

Complete
Story