← Back to context

Comment by senko

3 years ago

QNX was (is?) such a great OS. This was my first encounter with a microkernel based OS that actually worked, and well.

If I remember correctly, they were moving towards OSS at some point (or at least toward opening it to a wider community). I had it installed in a VM, did some packaging of open source stuff to QNX (bash and irssi, I think), was fun.

At some point they focused on industry/enterprise and that was the end of that for me, but led me to discover L4 later on, and I still have a soft spot for microkernels.

Indeed. I submitted this partly because I get so very tired of Linux zealots claiming that the HURD "proves" that microkernels can't work, or that Minix 3 shows that, OK, they can work, but they're crippled.