Hacker News Reader

Comment by feld | Hacker News Reader

Which professional routers? Cisco doesn't use QNX and Juniper uses FreeBSD. I'm not sure there are any other router manufacturers that matter.

View on HN

> Cisco doesn't use QNX

Other than on their most expensive, powerful routers.

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

Wow, I forgot that even existed. Here I was thinking of every switch, firewall, and routing product they've done except this line. I guess it doesn't help that I've never had a reason to touch one as every carrier grade router I've used has been Juniper. I wonder why they went with a whole new platform based on QNX when you don't benefit from a realtime OS if all the packets are moved in hardware? Must be something about the pain of upgrades and reloads on other Cisco product lines and somehow QNX can minimize these outage windows.

I've still yet to meet someone who actually prefers Cisco over Juniper MX. I wonder who is buying these?

"I've still yet to meet someone who actually prefers Cisco over Juniper MX. I wonder who is buying these?"

You have met my ex-boss.He had no reason to necessarily prefer Cisco other than that's all he was accustomed to.

But how do you get "accustomed" to it when every OS Cisco has looks the same but is different enough to drive a man insane?

It's a highly-reliable, ultra-responsive, self-healing OS w/ plenty of middleware and supported architectures. Also easy to develop on. It's already 90% to their goal for their OS and software. Why not use what already works? If it makes them enough money, they could try to develop something similar in-house.