QNX, Neutrino, RTP ?

Hello!

I’m a newbie with QNX and I would like differences between QNX, Neutrino and
Rtp. In fact it seems that many people don’t always use this terms with the
apropriate meaning.

Thanks

Vincent

QNX Neutrino is the operating system, a.k.a. QNX6.
QNX RTP is Neutrino + Photon (Windowish graphical interface) + development tools.
QNX (QNX Software Systems) is the manufacturer.
Check out www.qnx.com for more info.

/ Tom

Vincent wrote:

Hello!

I’m a newbie with QNX and I would like differences between QNX, Neutrino and
Rtp. In fact it seems that many people don’t always use this terms with the
apropriate meaning.

Thanks

Vincent

Tomas Högström <tomas@scandicraft.com> wrote in message
news:3AE1B909.C116049C@scandicraft.com

QNX Neutrino is the operating system, a.k.a. QNX6.

This is nitpicking, but…
According to QNX (the company), Neutrino is the new improved microkernel at
the heart of the QNX6 operating system. Kind of like the Mach “microkernel”
(I use the term loosely) is at the heart of MACOS X. So, it is not correct
to say “the Neutrino operating system”. I guess the microkernel at the
heart of QNX4 did not rate a name…(personally I like to call it Fred)

QNX RTP is Neutrino + Photon (Windowish graphical interface) + development
tools.

That’s Photon 2.0

QNX (QNX Software Systems) is the manufacturer.

Another note. Many, many, many people just call the operating system “QNX”.
It is up to you, the psychic listener, to decipher exactly which operating
system (QNX2.x, QNX4.x, or QNX6.x) they are talking about. Luckily this is
usually fairly easy since QNX6 people are usually bitching about gcc,
threads, resource managers, and new hardware support. On the other hand,
QNX4 folks will be talking about such mysterious things as Fsys, Watcom,
Net.ether82557, and Dev.ansi.

Check out > www.qnx.com > for more info.

/ Tom

Vincent wrote:

Hello!

I’m a newbie with QNX and I would like differences between QNX, Neutrino
and
Rtp. In fact it seems that many people don’t always use this terms with
the
apropriate meaning.

Thanks

Vincent

“Stephen Thomas” <slthomas@corpDOTolin.com> wrote in message
news:9bsn8k$k29$1@inn.qnx.com

Tomas Högström <> tomas@scandicraft.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3AE1B909.C116049C@scandicraft.com> …
QNX Neutrino is the operating system, a.k.a. QNX6.

This is nitpicking, but…
According to QNX (the company), Neutrino is the new improved microkernel
at
the heart of the QNX6 operating system. Kind of like the Mach
“microkernel”
(I use the term loosely) is at the heart of MACOS X. So, it is not
correct
to say “the Neutrino operating system”. I guess the microkernel at the
heart of QNX4 did not rate a name…(personally I like to call it Fred)

LOL. If you try to ask inside QNX (I did, when I was in their fort) you’d be
surprised to find out that they basically don’t know answer themselves. Or
more exactly, there are about as many answers as people working there. Here
is long story based on mostly unofficial information and my personal
perception of events :wink:

Historically, ‘Neutrino’ was nickname for the project with a goal to develop
‘The Holy Grail’ of OS. Something what could be scaled up and down from
toaster to SMP servers. It turned out that the goal was little too daring
given the amount of manpower they could allocate.

At that time they still continued active development of QNX4 branch and I
saw unofficial alpha of QNX4.30. Apparently they tried some experimentation
with VM there, so it did not boot in less than 16Mb of RAM. It was never
officially released and then dropped in favor of QNX4.25.

Meanwhile time passed on and they needed to release something to justify
development efforts. So they decided to concentrate on lower end of scale
and that’s how ‘Neutrino 1.0’ was born (in 1996 I believe). It had some
customers but never was a major player anywhere. Design full of compromises
and extremely limited hardware support. It had threads but no VM and could
not fully support POSIX due to that. It was so low profile product that they
never bothered inventing new name for it, but ‘Neutrino’ is not a bad choice
anyway, if only everyone could spell it properly :wink:

Somewhere there they apparently figured that they could do much more
interesting things with totally new kernel design of Neutrino that it would
ever be possible to do with QNX4 without major destabilisation of it
(remember 4.30). Then QNX4 branch was silently switched into ‘maintenance
mode’ (which was never admitted of course). Major efforts were put into
further development of Neutrino and the idea of ‘Holy Grail’ was somewhat
revived. New plan suggested Neutrino would have 4 different memory
protection models:

  1. single address space, no processes, everything is linked with microkernel
    and libc. Much like WxWorks but with as much POSIX compatibility as
    possible.
  2. System and User address spaces (all user apps are in singe User space).
  3. System and User address spaceses with protection between users (by
    dynamic toggling of protection attributes)
  4. Full VM (everyone has its own).

It implied that microkernel would be available separately and multiply
process managers could be designed providing different ‘flavors’ (POSIX
flavor, Amiga flavor, you name it …). So far so good, but by 1998 it was
time for another compromise. Neutrino 2.0 was released again without giving
much thought to name. Only last (full VM) model was implemented and all
other good intentions were pretty much forgotten. It was good enough to
start development but really unstable.

Most of major problems were fixed then in 2.1 release which then became base
for experimental ‘Augusta’ project announced to limited beta sites in 1999.
Augusta added Photon 2.0 and self-hosted GCC toolchain. After about half a
year of beta testing the ‘RTP’ was announced, which was official name for
Augusta.

Then trouble with names started because of exposure to large number of
people who did not know that history and were confused to hell with RTP name
(as many people noticed, if QNX made cars they’d call their new model ‘Sport
Car’). So after another half a year of flames and arguing they came up with
QNX6 name but again forgot to tell us what exactly it refers to. As far as I
can tell it refers to the whole thing available for download. Confusion
comes from the fact that they still sell ‘OEM’ version still named ‘QNX
Neutrino 2.1’ which unlike QNX6 distribution does not have self-hosted
environment and Photon 2.0 (it can run Photon 1.14 though) but OTOH it
supports non-x86 architectures. Nevertheless, x86 version of QNX Neutrino
2.1 is basically stripped down QNX6. Best way to think of them is as about
different Linux distributions, based on the same kernel.

To add to confusion, for some time they kept releasing new versions in both
branches for some time and sometimes you could not tell which one is ‘newer’
or ‘better’. By now it looks like they are encouraging OEMs to switch to
QNX6 when it comes to support, but you still have to buy OEM version for
commercial development. LOL, what else one can say …

I suppose everything is perfectly clear now, isn’t it :wink:

  • Igor

On Sat, 21 Apr 2001 18:01:06 -0500, “Igor Kovalenko”
<kovalenko@home.com> wrote:

[cut]

To add to confusion, for some time they kept releasing new versions in both
branches for some time and sometimes you could not tell which one is ‘newer’
or ‘better’. By now it looks like they are encouraging OEMs to switch to
QNX6 when it comes to support, but you still have to buy OEM version for
commercial development. LOL, what else one can say …

I suppose everything is perfectly clear now, isn’t it > :wink:

  • Igor

Wow, that deserves some epostcard :wink: