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Transparent IPC over the network was the reason I set up QNX a long time ago (back when it was freely available for a bit).

I can't help but wonder how a Raspberry Pi Port would fare - the thing would be tremendously efficient, and it would certainly increase their popularity.

Edit: well, apparently someone ported QNX 6, but licensing requirements seem to curtail its use for hobbyists - https://github.com/varghes/Raspberry-QNX




They'll never get it. They could really own the space and be a serious competitor to RedHat. Especially with all the self-driving car research and other real time tasks QNX would rock if it were open source.


Yup. Completely agree. I worked on a project that moved off of qnx because dealing with cost and maintainability issues was too much of a pain.

I don't mean maintainability as in the system itself didn't work. I mean the pain of updating, upgrading, and adding to our system. Maybe the shop I was at just didn't have things set up well, but as a result we were trapped on a specific version of neutrino while trying to interface with modern networked and front end systems. When we can easily upgrade a Linux kernel, apt/yum/pacman install a package, and have more modern versions of our toolchains, it was easy to justify the switch. Not to mention not having to port 3rd party packages we decide to use, which is out of the question for the closed source ones and frankly just a lot of work for the open source ones.

It honestly felt like we were always stepping back 10-15 years in time trying to do something on QNX. And unless there is some hidden community I never discovered in my short stint as a qnx oriented dev, anytime I would stumble upon a forum for qnx stuff it seemed like the last post was from 2008 or so. And don't get me started on their online docs. "Oh this web documentation for <thing> is deprecated. Click this link (that dumps you on the front page of multi-page, hard to search HTML docs) to go to the up to date documentation."

It really is a shame too, because their IPC setup was insanely powerful. And I don't think I ever actually experienced an OS crash. The whole OS boiled down to its IPC concept, and that's what made it so cool and so useful: - Kernel module? IPCs under the hood to 'plug in' to the system. - POSIX? Thin wrapper over the IPC stuff. - Need to talk between your processes? Sure you could use sockets or shared memory like Linux, but those QNX IPCs work fine (and I'd argue they were way easier to use, too). - Networked processes? Just use that same IPC setup. - Networked/distributed OS stuff? The OS is built on those IPCs you just networked in the previous bullet.


Sounds like the OP would have been the guy to help you.


Blackberry Pi?




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