Hiya folks! I’m John from the Developer Relations team at QNX. I just wanted to let you know that, through our QNX Everywhere program, we’re opening the doors to QNX like things used to be.
I see a lot of folks here still work on products as far back as QNX 2! That’s amazing! It’s a testament to what the platform can be if it’s open to the community for feedback and contributions. We’re getting there, starting with the availability of free non-commercial licenses to use the newest QNX. You can go today to get a free license to QNX 8.0 with just a few clicks: Free Access to QNX SDP 8.0 for Non-Commercial Use
We’ve also just released some sample apps and a ready-to-go QNX 8.0 quick start target image for Raspberry Pi 4. All you have to do is download and flash the image, and you’ve got a running QNX 8.0 target that connects to Momentics or VSCode and all of the QNX tooling for development and debugging. It even has a little graphical demo launcher the team whipped up!
I know some of you must be intrigued by this and are anxious to take a peak at the multi-core processing and throughput improvements in QNX 8.0! Your feedback about QNX 8.0 and about our QNX Everywhere initiative are invaluable, and I’ll be paying extra special attention to the group here when bringing feedback to the QNX leaders for consideration. Please let me know what you think and what we can do to open the gates even more. It’s only just the beginning! You can find me here, on StackOverflow for technical questions, and on some other social platforms.
I notice that no-one has responded to your notice about the QNX8 non-commercial licences. So I will!
I was approved to obtain it and after building up a new Ubuntu Linux box managed to download and install the SDP last Monday (my time). I now have it running (able to build at least) and managed to build the Raspberry Pi4 BSP without any real problems (other than me not setting up the environment properly)! I hope to try the new QNX8 RPi4 image later today to see how it goes. It is quite different to the 7.1 RPi4 build but so far nothing untoward.
I notice a few traditional QNX utilities have been removed. Probably the loss of qtalk hits me the most as I used it extensively - since for the last 29 years I have been working with QNX serial drivers. I guess I will have to write my own terminal program but I’d be interested to know why qtalk was removed from the lineup. I realise that the utilities are mainly out of the Toolbox but some useful QNX specific utilities could have been retained. QCP also gone but that (for me at least) is not a big deal. I used to use textto a lot but for what I intend using this QNX8 for (my own interest basically) it’s not a big deal either.
I do like the fact that telnet and FTP have been removed from the BSP images in favour of SSH/SCP! I had already done that with my QNX 7.1 images/systems. Not sure about PAM however…
Like a couple of others who frequent this forum I have been a QNX user for a long time. 37 years - back to the QNX2/3 days - and have used it exclusively through the QNX4, QNX6, and QNX7 eras, to this day (well, last February anyway). A lot has been lost in recent years - things that made QNX unique. First (QNX6.6) we lost Photon ( a great GUI) and a self-hosted development system (for x86). The latter didn’t really affect me but losing Photon with 6.5 stopped me in my tracks with a product I had developed back then. Now, with QNX8 we have lost QNET, and the ability to share IRQ’s within one thread (InterruptAttach()). I expect to find a few more lost features as I move forward but these are the two that stick out. In both cases, if I were to come out of retirement and get serious again, a major system design would be required as I would never have thought (and didn’t) that core QNX features would simply be removed (for whatever reasons - and I am aware of some of them).
Presumably the Send/Receive/Reply IPC and resource manager architecture is not under threat!
Anyway, it is good that Blackberry has seen fit to offer these non-commercial licences as forking out 5-digit amounts of dollars to start learning about QNX and how to use it was a tall order! Now, hopefully, there is an easy pathway for Linux developers (especially disgruntled Linux developers - and I know a few of them)! will take the opportunity to learn about an alternative approach to such things as hardware driver implementations (resource managers), event driven system design, etc. I know, way back in my day (pre-Linux) I saw the advantages of QNX and have stayed with it ever since. But it is now time for a new generation of QNX developers and hopefully they take this up. I, for one, will and do encourage it. As for me, well, I no longer work [much] for a living (being “retired”) but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest in what sustained me and my family for close to 40 years!
Thanks John,
I’m one of those guys that still can help with QNX 2. I think this is a good step for Blackberry.
Geoff,
While I like your optimistic view of bringing over disgruntled Linux programmers, it’s not clear if this will be productive. I have almost 40 years of experience building message passing based systems and as you know, it takes a bit of time to get the hang of it. In the last 10-15 years I’ve been called in on projects where the programmers have buildt their applications as if they were in a monolithic kernel environment. That is to say they build the entire system as one process with different components running in separate threads. I’ve found them resistant to learning anything new. That of course is a shame as building small robust protected and restartable units with QNX is one of its shining features. I’ve also noticed that when QNX removes a feature, they are resistant to making the source available to anyone who might require it. I’ve observed that attitude lose them more than one customer including the US Postal Service.
Thank you both for your replies! I don’t have much to add in response, but I do really appreciate hearing your perspectives as QNX veterans. Knowing you’re watching these changes and evaluating them for new generations of QNX developers is a great motivator to me and the team to make sure we’re taking the right steps in this program. Cheers!
I have written a rather lengthy document that might take a lot of the pain associated with getting started with a working Raspberry Pi4 system. It is intended for people interested in getting to the point where they can write a program, transfer it to the RPi4 target, and run it. I imagine these will include people who have no QNX or even Linux experience, or no knowledge of the Raspberry Pi4 hardware.
I start with how to download the SDK from the QNX website using the QNX Software Centre (also downloaded), install the SDK on a suitable Linux box, then download the Raspberry Pi4 BSP (also using the QSC), build the RPi4 Image File System (IFS) file, and get it onto an SD card from which the Rpi4 will boot.
While the provided RPi4 IFS will work, it is read-only which for this purpose is not (in my opinion) terribly helpful. So I explain how I implement my QNX systems so that I also have a writable native QNX6 file system on the SD card to use.
I am not sure if this sort of thing is explained elsewhere.
Please indicate on this thread or even better PM me if there is any interest. If there is I think I can post it without getting into trouble with anyone. I’m making the effort in order to assist people who might find themselves up against a brick wall getting started and might otherwise lose interest and give up.