Comment by heja2009
9 days ago
I worked with QNX 4 at uni and we built a robot system based on 2-4 networked 486/Pentium CPU cards in a rack with it [1]. We fully used the OS to make our robot system both hard real-time and completely network based using QNX's native capabilities. This gave me a deep understanding of those issues in my later career in robotics systems and I basically recreated - tediously - most of its features with UDP, TCP/IP and various IPC (inter process communication) features on vxWorks, SunOS and Linux.
One feature of the OS I fondly remember was that the most basic system calls (send/receive/reply) were implemented as about 3 inline assembler instructions each directly in the header file (qnx.h ?).
QNX used to be the golden standard of impossible things for microkernels, that in reality are actually used.
Nowadays not sure how it compares to other ones with wide field experience like Nintendo Switch Horizon, seL4 and more recently HarmonyOS NEXT.
The HongMeng kernel, performance wise, seems indeed to be in the same ballpark as sel4 or QNX, but it doesn't seem that it will be open-sourced.
Perhaps it won't be open sourced, but having read one of the papers written for it, the principles behind its advancements can easily be added to the microkernel repertoire.
8 replies →