Hacker News Reader

Comment by MawKKe | Hacker News Reader

I decided to try out Haiku last week. I was positively surprised how fast the whole process was. Installer loaded, system was installed and rebooted in about 20-30 seconds (not accounting for human I/O latency). And this was in a VM with SATA disk backing.

Makes you yearn for simpler times.

View on HN

> Installer loaded, system was installed and rebooted in about 20-30 seconds

This was my experience with QNX 6 two decades ago. Installing and booting into its beautiful Photon desktop environment took less time than it took to just boot Windows 2000.

> And this was in a VM with SATA disk backing.

Believing virtualization always makes things slower is a mistake. Windows XP always booted and worked a lot faster in a VirtualBox under Linux than it did directly on the same machine.

Oh, QNX [0]! That was such a great OS, and quite advanced for the times (microkernel, realtime, userland was POSIX complaint etc).

I remember I tried QNX Neutrino sometime in the first half of the 2000's, and it literally booted from a 1.44MB floppy into a UI (Photon), and had a working browser and everything needed to setup an internet connection (back then, this included dialup related stuff).

Of all OSes that could have been, this is the one I am most upset about not succeeding. I know it still exists in some forms, but it's pretty much fringe.

Refs:

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

What is worth additional mentioning is PhAB (Photon Application Builder). It was a visual (like in Visual Basic) RAD C++ GUI app builder which came bundled with the OS and accompanied by a great tutorial. It was so great, I bloody wish its clone was available for Linux (and Haiku perhaps).

I also miss Photon's visual style. Subjectively, it was the best I've ever seen (and Haiku feels somewhat close to this taste actually). If somebody would offer a bundle of Linux (XFCE, GNOME, KDE) and Windows (10) themes resembling QNX 6 Photon I would buy them for some real money.

There was a KDE3/QT3 theme for Photon, and I am sure for QT4 and QT5.

I'd say QNX isn't quite "niche". It continues to be very successful in automotive, with most modern cars sold probably running at least a few instances on different computers throughout the in-vehicle network. Also other industries.

It has safety certifications that are so far difficult to achieve with anything else able to support the required use cases.

I think niche is fair, especially since they are almost entirely driven out of the non-safety use cases, and even in them many look for alternatives (although they are hard to find). It's a shame really, QNX has some really nice parts, but it's kind of being kept on almost-life-support and isn't getting the support it needs to flourish. QNX seems to have decided that they'll ride down the almost-captive audiences they have for a few decades and collect the money until then.

Safety use cases have always been its main target audience, the others were the niches from QNX point of view.

I don't really understand why not use it on desktop though (besides the fact there are not much relevant desktop apps available). According to my feel QNX 6 was by far the best OS I ever ran on my desktop. Fast as hell, ubreakably reliable, visually beautiful and featuring an awesome Visual RAD C++ app builder out of the box. Ok, there are not much apps and games - that's a wicked circle.

But what seems really weird to me is why do nuclear power plants and critical oil infrastructure (as hacked recently) use Windows when there is QNX.

> Believing virtualization always makes things slower is a mistake.

Well, virtualization does make everything slower.

It's just that the boot process ends up quite fast as the virtual machine usually has a much less (and simpler) hardware to initialize at boot, has a simpler BIOS/UEFI, and shorter if any power-on self test. A physical machine can be made to those specs - Intel has done <2s boot from power is applied till a graphical application is visible and fully interactive for automotive back in 2019.

> Windows XP always booted and worked a lot faster in a VirtualBox under Linux than it did directly on the same machine.

Then it could probably boot even faster under QEMU/KVM.

BeOS (Haiku's emulant) and QNX were close cousins and competitors at that time, both staking out territory in the high-performance RTOS space. IIRC QNX offered hard realtime guarantees that BeOS did not, but was more limited in what it supported. I gather it was more successful in scaling down to embedded devices, too; BeIA pulled a number of tricks to get its image sizes down, but was still targeting pretty fully-featured multimedia-capable devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com