Allen,
This is a discussion between Matt Belkin and Ning comparing QNX and Wind. I received the exchange e-mail since I subscribed on the Gratis-Wind e-group.
Could you please comment on it?
Thank.
Anthony
Matt,
While pSOS has some of the features VxWorks lacks, it does not have a
microkernel or process model. Although pSOS and VxWorks have their own
strengths and weaknesses, they are in the same class of old RTOSes that lack
advanced features I mentioned.
Furthermore, pSOS is dead. WRS's roadmap show that pSOS will be "merged"
with VxWorks in the next version of OS after Cirrus (I forgot the code
name). This merged OS is just a Cirrus with pSOS API for backward
compatibility. If you need more convincing that WRS is not enhancing pSOS
beyond one more bug-fix release, just ask WRS's marketing or sales when they
will release TMS, Tornado or anything else for pSOS. I doubt any new
customers will choose pSOS.
I am dismissing the potential of VxWorks. I think there is a healthy market
for VxWorks. All I was trying to say is that VxWorks will not be the
standard OS for Cisco, and unlikely to be the standard OS for other high-end
network equipment vendors.
Traditionally, there are two kinds of networking equipment: the fast kind in
the core of network that does very little processing on the packets, such as
switches, and complex kind at edges of the network, such as routers,
firewalls and many kinds of gateways. Now people want equipment that's fast
and complex. Today's fastness means optical speed (100Gb) and today's
complexity ranges from policy based routing and traffic engineering to virus
scans and application level load balancing. Cisco's recent acquisition of
ArrowPoint is an evidence of the explosive growth in fast-and-complex
networking equipment market. In the ArrowPoint case, you control the layer 2
behaviors based on information in the layer 5 through 7.
How do you do that? You put packet processing of higher network layers in
silicon (contrasting to the traditional switches, such as TMS, that only
allow layer 2 processing to be down in silicon), and you run ever more
complex control software on host CPUs. Therefore, the modern networking
equipment demands more of advanced features commonly found on server or
desktop OSes, such as Unix, and less of absolute real-time response of
traditional RTOSes, such as VxWorks. In fact, embedded OS is more
appropriate here than real-time OS.
I am not saying that advanced OS features and real-timeness are mutually
exclusive. QNX showed us that you can have both. The bottom line is that the
networking market is moving towards OSes with advanced features.
Ning
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Belkin [mailto:mattb@egroups.net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 4:20 PM
To: gratis-wind@egroups.com
Subject: [gratis-wind] QNX and explosive growth
Ning, you make good points, but neglect to mention that pSOS does offer
many of these features. Accordingly, ISI was gaining considerable momentum
in datacom/telecom pre-merger. Secondly, while VxWorks had some of the
feature limitations you note, Wind (pre-merger) was focusing on the
significantly more profitable application layer with new products like TMS.
Herein lies a key element of the "explosive" growth opportunity as Microsoft
has taught us far too well.
-----Original Message-----
From: ning2m [mailto:ning2m@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 1:31 PM
To: gratis-wind@egroups.com
Subject: RE: [gratis-wind] Re: What's in it for Cisco?
Peter,
QNX has microkernel, process model, dynamically loadable modules and
device drivers, transparent distributed processing and many other features
that are lacking in VxWorks. For years, some people have been arguing
against putting such features in RTOS for performance and footprint reasons.
As hardware gets more powerful and software gets more complex, the arguments
are no longer valid, especially for the networking equipment.
Cirrus will have microkernel and process model (which WRS calls
Protection Domain). I don't know enough about Cirrus to discuss other
features but I doubt Cirrus, which is version 1.0 of WRS's new RTOS, will
have the richness, maturity and the stability of QNX.
If you consider the current IOS as an OS, it's a very crude one--hardly
more than a dispatching loop. It doesn't even have preemptive multitasking
(it has cooperative multitasking, similar to Windows 2.0). I don't know the
origin but suspect it was largely home grown.
Ning
-----Original Message-----
From: peters01@yahoo.com [mailto:peters01@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 12:00 PM
To: gratis-wind@egroups.com
Subject: [gratis-wind] Re: What's in it for Cisco?
Ning-
You state that Ciscos next generation IOS is based on QNX. What is
the
current generation based on ? What properties does QNX have that
Cirrus needs to have to compete ?
Peter Sullivan |
