It seems to me to be ideal for automation, yet most seem to be using Linux.
This is probably due to the Open Source status I suspect.
This is probably due to the Open Source status I suspect.
(IoT devices certainly use Linux, but mostly for the same reason they do everything else: to decrease their BOM while still seeming “feature-rich.”)
Air-handlers, fluid-coolers, chillers, etc., are now frequently powered by a JACE (an embedded controller running the Niagara platform on the QNX Neutrino microkernel). JACEs are used to handle integrating BACnet equipment and coordination across sites.
It's quietly becoming the standard way to do things if you're not just going to hand Honeywell or Trane a million dollars and hope things turn out ok.
It's OK, but would feel dated to most users. The really great feature is that there is no lag. The consistency of QNX is impressive. This is a real-time system, not a warmed-over time sharing system. No swapping or paging. Proper CPU scheduling. So little "why did it do that?"
That's more of a function of your hardware resources and workload than the OS architecture you're running. E.g. a lightweight Linux desktop installed on present-day hardware will literally run with zero swap use - in fact, it will cache most disk access. (Unless you open something that hogs RAM, of course.) That may not be literally a soft-RT system, but from the user's POV it's just as snappy as one.
I've used multiple QNX based user interfaces and the one thing they all had in common was their lagginess and unresponsiveness.