QNX pitch

today I'm taking the bulk of the day in a QNX presentation and i'll share what I have learned so far.

This is on of the leading RTOS (real time operating systems) in existance. of course people always claim they are better than their competetors but in this case I believe it.

Limitations:
Must be a 32-bit CPU
must have an MMU (memory management unit)

strenghs:
programs are NOT compiled with the kernel. they share normal memory space so are much easier to debug. as a result a machine can be upgraded without turning it off as the program is just updated without takign the kernel offline.

Standard coding methods (endian vs Endian and memory vs IO method) they let you write device drivers in a standard way so regardless of the end target (x86, PPC, etc) your code is the same, it is the work of the compiler to translate.

remote control. a process can be way away on a backplane, over serial, over ethernet, where ever and the kernel handles everything transparent to the program.

conclusions:
its an interesting method. who knows how much the license is, but it was pretty interesting when they said they could gurantee the origions of all of their code (remember the linux issues of open source?) so there are no problems in the future. This is most definatly NOT opensource.

competitiors:
vxworks
linux
windows CE (haha)

and a few others I cant remember.

back to the meeting where I only understand 10% =). maybe i'll learn something through osmosis.