has anybody ported a (probably truncated) TCP/IP stack to QNX2? we use one, but the ethernet card is proprietary and unbelievably expensive, and we want to get out from under the vendor’s thumb.
Rather than have you wonder why there is no response, I’m going to give you a little background that might help you understand the situation.
QNX 2 was created around 1983-1985, about 25 years ago. At the time Unix systems ran only on mini computers, usually costing 10’s of thousands of dollars. QNX 2 ran on 8088 processors in real mode along with 286+ processors in 64 bit real mode. A process could have at most 64K of code and 64K of data, with additional 64K “extra” data areas accessed by a non-standard ‘C’ method. Unlike QNX 4 and 6, QNX 2 was only Unix like in a cursory fashion. There were no fd’s for example. Fork did not do what TCP/IP expected it to do with open files. So in particular, any TCP/IP implementation would tend to be fairly limited and a hack.
Near the end of its life there appeared a some TCP/IP solutions. The first one consisted of a very expensive ISA board with a processor. Following this there were some proprietary ports to more or less standard ethernet cards. The market for these boards today is tiny. None of these solutions seemed to make customers very happy. I know this from years of hearing complaints.
If you are in need of staying with QNX 2 and you need TCP/IP, I have to say (with regret) that you should be happy that anyone sells and supports TCP/IP at all. QNX gave up support for QNX 2 over 10 years ago. Your best alternative would be to port your code to a more modern OS.
I’m not trying to be negative about this, it’s just what the situation warrants. I continue to do my best to support QNX 2 users as I am one of a few remaining consultants who know anything about it. I hope it is clear that what you are requesting would be similar to someone wanting new video support for Windows 3.0. It’s going to be expensive to get anyone to do it because the market is nil and effort is great.
Hello,
10 years ago, I purchased a TCP/IP solution for QNX2 from a german company:
akso.de/index.php?id=akso_qnx2_tcpip
At that time, the network card was a Novell NE2000-ISA card.
I saw on their website that today they support as well PCI network cards. This is surprising, because QNX2 did never support the PCI bus.
But even they support PCI network cards, you will have problems to find todays PCs that still can run QNX2.
From a Windows NT4 I was then able to telnet into QNX2 with NetTerm ( securenetterm.com/ ). It was the only terminal emulator I found that did support the native QNX2 terminal protocol.
We used that TCP/IP stack for QNX2 during the migration phase from QNX2 to Windows NT4. Even the TCP/IP stack was stable, you should definively move to a more modern OS as maschoen noticed it.
/Pascal
sigh …
OK, that’s pretty much what i expected; thanx, all! i distinctly remember in 1993 when AOL made a press release bragging that they had reached 300 000 customers (i.e., the internet had become commercially viable). i didn’t know about any updates to the OS, however; i thought all development had stopped as of 1992, and that no TCP/IP stack had been developed for that reason.
ours is a legacy product with a tiny market, and our Engineering department doesn’t even have the money to look into switching vendors, let alone do any porting. i was just hoping that somebody else had found a solution that could be easily implemented without spending more than a man-week or two.
again, thanx!