QNX and BSD

I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has that
QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow freeBSD
drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This would alleviate
some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk subsystem
from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them with GEOM and the
wealth of drivers and filesystems available from FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK

[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that]
Robert Krten, PDP minicomputer collector http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/

Robert Krten wrote:

I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has that
QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow freeBSD
drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This would alleviate
some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk subsystem
from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them with GEOM and the
wealth of drivers and filesystems available from FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK

If you could replace fs-cifs with the standard Samba available for BSD,
Linux, Solaris etc. That would be very interesting, fs-cifs, in my
experience does not work at all well.

Cheers

Garry

Garry wrote:

Robert Krten wrote:

I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has
that
QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow
freeBSD
drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This would
alleviate
some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk
subsystem
from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them with GEOM and the
wealth of drivers and filesystems available from FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK


If you could replace fs-cifs with the standard Samba available for BSD,
Linux, Solaris etc. That would be very interesting, fs-cifs, in my
experience does not work at all well.

Hmm … I don’t believe that such work is intended by Rob.

Porting fs-cifs to FreeBSD is the issue … they don’t have such a
damned thing :slight_smile:

Cheers

Armin



Cheers

Garry

Armin Steinhoff <a-steinhoff@web.de> wrote:

Garry wrote:
Robert Krten wrote:

I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has
that
QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow
freeBSD
drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This would
alleviate
some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk
subsystem
from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them with GEOM and the
wealth of drivers and filesystems available from FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK


If you could replace fs-cifs with the standard Samba available for BSD,
Linux, Solaris etc. That would be very interesting, fs-cifs, in my
experience does not work at all well.

Hmm … I don’t believe that such work is intended by Rob.

Porting fs-cifs to FreeBSD is the issue … they don’t have such a
damned thing > :slight_smile:

What do you mean, doesn’t exist? smbd and nmbd?

However, no, I’m not proposing to simply port existing UNIXy utilities
to QNX – that’s already been / being done. I’m looking at it at a more
fundamental level.

Cheers,
-RK


[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that]
Robert Krten, PDP minicomputer collector http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/

Robert Krten wrote:

Armin Steinhoff <> a-steinhoff@web.de> > wrote:

Garry wrote:

Robert Krten wrote:


I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has
that
QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow
freeBSD
drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This would
alleviate
some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk
subsystem
from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them with GEOM and the
wealth of drivers and filesystems available from FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK


If you could replace fs-cifs with the standard Samba available for BSD,
Linux, Solaris etc. That would be very interesting, fs-cifs, in my
experience does not work at all well.


Hmm … I don’t believe that such work is intended by Rob.


Porting fs-cifs to FreeBSD is the issue … they don’t have such a
damned thing > :slight_smile:


What do you mean, doesn’t exist? smbd and nmbd?

No, no … I mean the FreeBSD world haven’t that long standing negative
feeling with a utility like fs-cifs … so we could provide it to FreeBSD :slight_smile:

Would be interesting to see what happens at the FreeBSD site when they
have to work with such a buggy utility :slight_smile:

Sorry about that ironical posting …

Cheers

Armin

However, no, I’m not proposing to simply port existing UNIXy utilities
to QNX – that’s already been / being done. I’m looking at it at a more
fundamental level.

Cheers,
-RK

“Robert Krten” <rk@parse.com> wrote in message
news:co8ccv$153$1@inn.qnx.com

Armin Steinhoff <> a-steinhoff@web.de> > wrote:
Garry wrote:
Robert Krten wrote:

I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has
that
QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow
freeBSD
drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This would
alleviate
some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk
subsystem
from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them with GEOM and
the
wealth of drivers and filesystems available from FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK


If you could replace fs-cifs with the standard Samba available for BSD,
Linux, Solaris etc. That would be very interesting, fs-cifs, in my
experience does not work at all well.

Hmm … I don’t believe that such work is intended by Rob.

Porting fs-cifs to FreeBSD is the issue … they don’t have such a
damned thing > :slight_smile:

What do you mean, doesn’t exist? smbd and nmbd?

These are server utility not client, they don’t give access to a Windows
share for example

However, no, I’m not proposing to simply port existing UNIXy utilities
to QNX – that’s already been / being done. I’m looking at it at a more
fundamental level.

Cheers,
-RK


[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to
you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that]
Robert Krten, PDP minicomputer collector > http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/

Porting fs-cifs to FreeBSD is the issue … they don’t have such a
damned thing > :slight_smile:

What do you mean, doesn’t exist? smbd and nmbd?

These are server utility not client, they don’t give access to a
Windows share for example

smbclient

Robert Muil <r.muil@crcmining.com.au> wrote:

Robert,

I think your idea is very interesting, albeit ambitious. I think it should
be possible to provide FreeBSD services under QNX (the other way would be a
nightmare because of the ease of resource manager design), but I think it
will be difficult. Many of the drivers in FreeBSD are implemented as kernel
libraries, as far as I understand, and so will be designed around a
fundamentally different concept than QNX drivers.

You’ll probably end up redesigning Java.

Shudder – I want this to be fast! :slight_smile:

However, it is a worthy goal, and certainly of much use.

It will definitely be interesting. Right now it’s just in the speculation
phase…

Cheers,
-RK

Robert.

Robert Krten wrote:
I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has
that QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow
freeBSD drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This
would alleviate some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support
hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk
subsystem from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them
with GEOM and the wealth of drivers and filesystems available from
FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK


[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that]
Robert Krten, PDP minicomputer collector http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/

Robert,

I think your idea is very interesting, albeit ambitious. I think it should
be possible to provide FreeBSD services under QNX (the other way would be a
nightmare because of the ease of resource manager design), but I think it
will be difficult. Many of the drivers in FreeBSD are implemented as kernel
libraries, as far as I understand, and so will be designed around a
fundamentally different concept than QNX drivers.

You’ll probably end up redesigning Java.

However, it is a worthy goal, and certainly of much use.

Robert.

Robert Krten wrote:

I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has
that QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow
freeBSD drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This
would alleviate some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support
hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk
subsystem from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them
with GEOM and the wealth of drivers and filesystems available from
FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK

It’s been done before. The QNX6 TCP stack is more or less carved-out piece
of NetBSD.
But if you’re after the wealth of drivers/software, you probably should
pulling in frameworks from Linux, not BSD.
It has also been done before (sound subsystem).

– igor

“Robert Krten” <rk@parse.com> wrote in message
news:codkg7$qrn$1@inn.qnx.com

Robert Muil <> r.muil@crcmining.com.au> > wrote:
Robert,

I think your idea is very interesting, albeit ambitious. I think it
should
be possible to provide FreeBSD services under QNX (the other way would
be a
nightmare because of the ease of resource manager design), but I think
it
will be difficult. Many of the drivers in FreeBSD are implemented as
kernel
libraries, as far as I understand, and so will be designed around a
fundamentally different concept than QNX drivers.

You’ll probably end up redesigning Java.

Shudder – I want this to be fast! > :slight_smile:

However, it is a worthy goal, and certainly of much use.

It will definitely be interesting. Right now it’s just in the speculation
phase…

Cheers,
-RK

Robert.

Robert Krten wrote:
I’ve been using FreeBSD for a while now, and am amazed at what it has
that QNX doesn’t have, and vice versa.

I’d like to investigate creating an infrastructure that would allow
freeBSD drivers and higher level constructs to live within QNX. This
would alleviate some of the perrenial “Oh, QNX doesn’t support
hardware X” problems.

Targets for this effort might include such things as the entire disk
subsystem from QNX – remove the devb-* and fs-* and replace them
with GEOM and the wealth of drivers and filesystems available from
FreeBSD.

Audio cards and other hardware devices would be good targets too.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
-RK


\

[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to
you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that]
Robert Krten, PDP minicomputer collector > http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/

Robert Muil wrote:

Porting fs-cifs to FreeBSD is the issue … they don’t have such a
damned thing > :slight_smile:

What do you mean, doesn’t exist? smbd and nmbd?


These are server utility not client, they don’t give access to a
Windows share for example


smbclient

smbclient doesn’t do it as a full blown filesystem like smbfs does on
Linux or fs-cifs does on QNX - it’s just a basic ftp like shell. Any
system that has Samba has smbclient, including QNX.

chris

Robert Krten wrote:

However, no, I’m not proposing to simply port existing UNIXy utilities
to QNX – that’s already been / being done. I’m looking at it at a more
fundamental level.

Mach kernels and Mac OS X (loosely based on Mach) generally have a BSD
subsystem running on top of them; I don’t see why such a thing couldn’t
be done for Neutrino.

I don’t know what architecture those are using though. Suppose you
could write a *BSD resource manager for the *BSD kernel to run on…


Chris Herborth (cherborth@qnx.com)
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil scientist.

Chris McKillop wrote:

smbclient doesn’t do it as a full blown filesystem like smbfs does on
Linux or fs-cifs does on QNX - it’s just a basic ftp like shell. Any
system that has Samba has smbclient, including QNX.

I’d just like to point out that FreeBSD 5.3 has no trouble mounting
CIFS/Samba shares… just in case someone had the impression it can’t do
that. :slight_smile:


Chris Herborth (cherborth@qnx.com)
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil scientist.

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

It’s been done before. The QNX6 TCP stack is more or less carved-out piece
of NetBSD.
But if you’re after the wealth of drivers/software, you probably should
pulling in frameworks from Linux, not BSD.
It has also been done before (sound subsystem).

The nice thing about using the FreeBSD code is that it works. :wink:


Chris Herborth (cherborth@qnx.com)
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil scientist.

Chris Herborth <cherborth@qnx.com> wrote:

Igor Kovalenko wrote:
It’s been done before. The QNX6 TCP stack is more or less carved-out piece
of NetBSD.
But if you’re after the wealth of drivers/software, you probably should
pulling in frameworks from Linux, not BSD.
It has also been done before (sound subsystem).

The nice thing about using the FreeBSD code is that it works. > :wink:

Thank you for being the BSD bigot. I was going to say just that exact
same thing, but then figured no need to stir the pot further. But since
this is qnx.cafe :slight_smile:

a) GNU is the Microsoft of Free Software
b) Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
c) BSD is for people who love UNIX.

'nuff said. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
-RK


[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that]
Robert Krten, PDP minicomputer collector http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/

Evan Hillas wrote:

I never thought I’d be jumping in this subject but I’m getting used to
the unix way of things … except for vi! > :wink:

The nice thing about UNIX is that there’s almost always more than one
version of something. For text editors, there are probably 1000
different ones.

Try EMACS. :wink:


Chris Herborth (cherborth@qnx.com)
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil scientist.

Robert Krten wrote:

Chris Herborth <> cherborth@qnx.com> > wrote:
The nice thing about using the FreeBSD code is that it works. > :wink:

Thank you for being the BSD bigot. I was going to say just that exact
same thing, but then figured no need to stir the pot further. But since
this is qnx.cafe > :slight_smile:

a) GNU is the Microsoft of Free Software

It maybe an all or nothing deal, but don’t lose sight of the fate that
GPL is the reaction to patent law.


b) Linux is for people who hate Microsoft

And just wanting to get business done cost effectively.


c) BSD is for people who love UNIX.

Agreed.


I never thought I’d be jumping in this subject but I’m getting used to
the unix way of things … except for vi! :wink:

Evan Hillas <blarg@blarg.blarg> wrote:

Robert Krten wrote:
Chris Herborth <> cherborth@qnx.com> > wrote:
The nice thing about using the FreeBSD code is that it works. > :wink:

Thank you for being the BSD bigot. I was going to say just that exact
same thing, but then figured no need to stir the pot further. But since
this is qnx.cafe > :slight_smile:

a) GNU is the Microsoft of Free Software

It maybe an all or nothing deal, but don’t lose sight of the fate that
GPL is the reaction to patent law.

b) Linux is for people who hate Microsoft

And just wanting to get business done cost effectively.

c) BSD is for people who love UNIX.

Agreed.

I never thought I’d be jumping in this subject but I’m getting used to
the unix way of things … except for vi! > :wink:

Man, vi is THE utlimate unixism! :slight_smile: Start with V6 ed and work your
way up to vi from there! :slight_smile:

Cheers,
-RK


[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that]
Robert Krten, PDP minicomputer collector http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/

“Robert Krten” <rk@parse.com> wrote in message
news:cofr85$ikp$1@inn.qnx.com

Chris Herborth <> cherborth@qnx.com> > wrote:
Igor Kovalenko wrote:
It’s been done before. The QNX6 TCP stack is more or less carved-out
piece
of NetBSD.
But if you’re after the wealth of drivers/software, you probably
should
pulling in frameworks from Linux, not BSD.
It has also been done before (sound subsystem).

The nice thing about using the FreeBSD code is that it works. > :wink:

Thank you for being the BSD bigot. I was going to say just that exact
same thing, but then figured no need to stir the pot further. But since
this is qnx.cafe > :slight_smile:

a) GNU is the Microsoft of Free Software
b) Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
c) BSD is for people who love UNIX.

d) QNX is for people with too much spare time

– igor

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

“Robert Krten” <> rk@parse.com> > wrote in message
news:cofr85$ikp$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …

Chris Herborth <> cherborth@qnx.com> > wrote:

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

It’s been done before. The QNX6 TCP stack is more or less carved-out

piece

of NetBSD.
But if you’re after the wealth of drivers/software, you probably

should

pulling in frameworks from Linux, not BSD.
It has also been done before (sound subsystem).

The nice thing about using the FreeBSD code is that it works. > :wink:

Thank you for being the BSD bigot. I was going to say just that exact
same thing, but then figured no need to stir the pot further. But since
this is qnx.cafe > :slight_smile:

a) GNU is the Microsoft of Free Software
b) Linux is for people who hate Microsoft

… and any kind of useful documentation :slight_smile:

Armin

c) BSD is for people who love UNIX.



d) QNX is for people with too much spare time

– igor