QNX Beats Wind River and Microsoft in RTOS Shootout

[CyberViking2000]

OTTAWA, July 23, 2002 - In a benchmark shootout between the industry's leading realtime operating systems (RTOSs) for embedded development, the QNX® Neutrino®  RTOS v6.1 comes out on top against Wind River VxWorks AE 1.1 and Microsoft Windows CE.NET. Dedicated Systems Experts, specialists in development support for embedded, realtime and fault-tolerant systems, tested the three RTOSs against seven key criteria and found QNX Neutrino RTOS v6.1 to be a superior RTOS on the whole.

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[Coder]

Anyone here also wish they had been using the Qnx kernel for DE instead of Tao?

Coder

[blubbe]

Future will tell if they will run Intent on top of QNX.

[Coder]

I have Qnx here but an old version. I think that I will download some stuff from their site tomorrow. I always liked Qnx. Still do offcourse.

Coder

[blubbe]

Will be interesting to see, if it was worth it, going the
TAO route. In the short-term atleast, QNX looks much better. To begin with It has alot Amiga-feel,
and migrating from AmigaOS to it seems pretty simple. It also runs on PPC and x86 NOW.
And it has mem-protection. Will the obvious proove
wrong ?

[Coder]

If I remember correct a lot of people from the staff of Qnx are Amiga fans.

Coder

[arcwave]

QNX RtP is cool, it's fast and scalable.  It would of been great to see it as the next AmigaOS foundation.

Does QNX work on PDAs and Cellphones?

[Troels_E]

Even though I guess Qnx works on (some) PDA's you must still remember that it is a totally diffrent approach than what TAO/Amiga are doing.

I have tried Qnx on a desktop PC but really didn't see how it should be "Amiga like". To me it just looked like another unix/linux variant, a really lightweight Linux actually.

Guess I will just wait forA1 and OS4:-)

[System]

Tao intent has a RTOS that runs *on top of* the Virtual Processor layer.  It is an RTOS that provides multitasking, memory management, IPC, etc.  It is realtime altough that may mean "soft" realtime.  Soft realtime (like BeOS) means it is great for media, but maybe not warheads.  intent RTOS may infact be hard realtime, I just don't know.

The intent RTOS is written in VP code so only the VP layer needs to be ported to another machine.  Device drivers are native to the intent OS and are written in VP or C compiled into VP binaries.  The same driver will work on x86 or PowerPC *without* a recompile.  Only the VP layer needs porting

QNX is a great RTOS, but Amiga and Tao have a smarter solution in the portable intent RTOS.  The entire history of binary compatibily problems have, poof!, disappeared.  Yes, even for the OS and drivers.

One thing that the intent RTOS does not have is a desktop.  QNX has a nice desktop.  But Amiga will provide the desktop which is already very mature.  It was mature before the others were born

[bhoggett]

Meanwhile, back in the Real World (tm)...

[blubbe]

Whats happening in the real world ?

[bhoggett]

In the real world there is a specific definition for a RTOS, one which does not have "soft" RTOS and "hard" RTOS. BeOS was not a RTOS at any stage. Just because it had good response times and was designed with multimedia in mind does not make it a RTOS. I haven't read anything about intent being a RTOS either, VP not withstanding.

QNX is a RTOS but, ironically, it is not as good at multimedia as BeOS was (is). In fact it would be fair to say that being a RTOS is not an essential prerequisite for a desktop OS. Of course, QNX is not really designed as a desktop OS and that is not QSSL's core business.

Which gets us back to TAO and intent. I have to admit to getting a bit tired of "AmigaOS will have this, AmigaOS will have that.". I know both Amiga and Hyperion have said AmigaDE will be incorporated into AOS4.2, but crucially we have heard no such statements from TAO, and yet it is TAO who would have to do the porting, because I haven't heard anything to indicate that Amiga Inc have any license to do any porting themselves. TAO have shot Amiga Inc's "plans" out of both barrels before (anyone remember how the new AmigaOS would be built on top of TAO technology?), and so far they have demonstrated that they do nothing without it falling soundly within their business and financial plans. I don't see how supporting an obscure desktop OS with a maximum user base of a few thousand users falls within TAO's business plan, but maybe someone knows something I don't, eh?
 ;-)

Essentially, Bill McEwen has always said "don't believe it unless you see it on our site". Well, WRT TAO technology I tend to apply a similar rule: "don't believe it until TAO have confirmed it."

[blubbe]

RTOS means some lowlevel operations (Im too tired to find the names of them) takes exactly a certain amount of time to execute, or they can be guarantied
to be inside a certain timeframe. Atleast thats what I
remember it as. Ofcource that doesnt have to have
anythiong to do with desktop use, it isnt very relevant.

QNX probably sees some chance of extra cache
from the desktop, and if it doesnt make money.. whatever, they have their other embedded buissiness, where they came from in the beginning.

QNX seemed very enthusiastic about Amiga, alot more than TAO. They even got together with Phase5
at one stage, when the current owners went after
Linux I think it was.

Well, TAO gets some free bug-testing by Amiga developers atleast
 ;-)

It IS quite strange how many seems to share fleecys dream, while not even knowing what it is, and without any realistic and sensible arguments at all.

Sure, its all so simple, just port a little cpu.layer and
world-domination here we come.  :-D  :-D

[Elektro]

"It IS quite strange how many seems to share fleecys dream, while not even knowing what it is, and without any realistic and sensible arguments at all.

Sure, its all so simple, just port a little cpu.layer and
world-domination here we come. "

:lol: LOL!

[System]

I know both Amiga and Hyperion have said AmigaDE will be incorporated into AOS4.2, but crucially we have heard no such statements from TAO, and yet it is TAO who would have to do the porting, because I haven't heard anything to indicate that Amiga Inc have any license to do any porting themselves.

Amiga certainly has a license to port intent to AmigaOS for PowerPC.  I have spoken with Tao and their license is very simple.  One buys an SDK for a particular hardware platform.  Tao provides the VP layer for the native CPU.  The licensee can deploy it as a stand-alone operating system or as an application on another OS.  Whatever method is chosen, the RTOS (and it is called "RTOS" by Tao) is always running.  The graphical environment, sometimes called elate, is actually a full RTOS with its own VP, memory model, multi-threading system, etc.

Really AmigaOS has two choices:  Port intent to AmigaOS for PowerPC or port AmigaOS to intent and then run intent on the bare hardware.

Now, some of you are getting kind of lippy.  I don't know much, but I have purchased a license for the AmigaDE SDK and the Tao intent ADK 1.3.1.  I have programmed a bit on each.  I have had 3 telephone conversations with folks at Tao and some email correnspondance.  I have been accessing documents on the Tao developer website.  These are not amazing credentials, but they are more than info gleaned from forums and news groups.

I do not know any plans that Amiga, Inc. has.  What I do know is that by the nature of Tao licensing, they can do whatever they please with intent technology as long as they pay their licensing fees.  The same offer is available to you or I.  I can't afford it right now, but at least I know what it takes to license intent because I picked up the phone and asked them.

Pax