Allen,
your analysis and analogies are superb. Thank you!
May I ask your response to these posts from the Gratis-Wind site . . . is QNX a possible threat to WIND's technology or business model?:
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Greg,
Cisco's next generation IOS is based on QNX, which is far superior to VxWorks. One can only hope that Cirrus will match the capabilities of QNX.
Ning
AND:
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 As hardware gets more powerful and software gets more complex, the arguments are no longer valid, especially for the networking equipment.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 |
