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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux.

The bummer is that it's not FOSS.

I wrote a QNX clone (32 bit when QNX was still 16 bit) and it was meant to become open source but that never happened. One of the most interesting projects I've worked on.

The bummer for the companies doing the home routers is really just that it costs money. The only people who give a flying fsck about the F part are hobbyists, sadly.

Source: worked in this industry.

Not having a hobbyist option, means there are fewer people trying to use it for new and interesting things.

Funny there doesn't seem to be an OSS attempt of something like it... ( Or my google-fu is weak )

Google Fuchsia is a capability-based, real-time operating system (RTOS) being developed by Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

15 years ago I waited for GNU Hurd, but now I am very interested how Google Fuchsia turns out. What I read it shapes up nicely, and I can imagine we all will use it in near future instead of Windows and other binary blob legacy operating systems; it might also replace Linux as Android kernel - but that is still just speculation.

That's going to be interesting. Some of the people at Google working on it are ex-QNX people.

Oh hell. I was initially skeptical but my hopes are up now that you say that.

I know some are ex BeOS people, but I haven't heard of anyone from QNX on the project. Apple did hire the founder of QNX not too long ago, though.

FreeRTOS is here: http://www.freertos.org/

Though the "RT" is the only real overlap. It's targeted more at lower end hardware, but does have an x86 implementation.

Minix 3 for reliability part, DROPS for real-time part, OKL4 for mobile, and Genode for security part are basically it that I'm aware. It's really the mix of capabilities in one system that makes QNX great. I don't know anything that has that despite the architecture described in great detail in freely-available papers. Just waiting to be cloned or improved on. :)

http://www.minix3.org/doc/reliable-os.pdf

https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/drops/overview.html

http://l4hq.org/projects/kernel/

https://genode.org/about/index

> "google-fu"

nice combination!

Well, one day gnu/hurd will be the FOSS system we all deserve.

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