[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“While I¹ve heard of QNX and their floppy-disk demo over a
year ago, and had read plenty of news regarding their RTOS
afterwards, it is only yesterday that I attempted to use the demo.
The results surprised me.”
“Normally, I am an active Open Source supporter, and prefer to
think of Linux/GNU as the ultimate OS for speed and portability. I
decided to download the QNX demo after I read this BeNews article
(Exclusive Preview – QNX RtP, just to see how “real-time” it really
is. For my test subject I chose the slowest machine I had available
– an antiquated NEC Powermate 450es (486 DX 2-66, 12 megs of ram,
512k Cirrus Logic video controller, and an NE2000 network card).
Linux (with an optimized kernel, mind you) with X and Blackbox (one
of the most minimal window managers available) chokes on this
machine, constantly swapping.”
“To my amazement, the QNX OS took under 30 seconds to load
from the floppy. What was an even bigger surprise was the hardware
configuration – none, the OS had taken care of everything. The
most shocking realization came when I saw how smoothly the
windowing system, the Photon microGUI, was. Even when the web
browser was loading up big pages, the system remained as responsive
as ever – an amazing feat considering how old the machine, and how
potentially feature-full the OS could be. Networking performance
was also optimal – downloads looked like they went as fast as the
antiquated network card could handle them.”