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0 pointsfouc4y ago0 comments

Isn't QNX a microkernel? I remember it being known for being quite fast?

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No, it's more of a nanokernel. It's very fast.

Full disclosure: I maintain QNX toolchain.

As a real-time OS it is known for deterministic response times. If it were exceptionally fast (and licenses cheap enough), you'd see hosts in the TOP500 using it.

eggy4y ago

I agree 100%. QNX is lurking in products you may use. It was the OS for the show control system that is used throughout entertainment where real-time is necessary for the safety of the devices it controls, which also have hardware safety at the lower level. I would drop into the QNX terminal for certain tasks. Unfortunately, you used to be able to download the show control software and play with it, but it has since been bought buy a company that sells it with the equipment they rent, so you need to buy trainging and it is behind their wall now. Not QNX, but the show control software that runs on QNX.

p_l4y ago

TOP500 is chock full of microkernels though, even if the "I/O nodes" would run Linux

guenthert4y ago

I'd like to see more information about that. I remember that Penguin Computing offered such some 15 years ago, but don't know where it was deployed or still is. Cray and IBM had also such a concept for their superclusers in the past, but are they still using such? The one HPC environment I worked on (a major car manufacturer in Europe) used plain RH Linux on all nodes as recently as three years ago.

The current #1 (Fugaku) uses IHK/McKernel as kernel for the actual payload. The previous #1 (IBM Summit) seems to use RH Linux though. Perhaps, since the most performance critical part is run by and within the GPGPU(s), the actual OS doesn't matter all that much (for performance -- it matters of course for programmer's comfort/efficiency).

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bregma4y ago

No, it's more of a nanokernel. It's very fast.

Full disclosure: I maintain QNX toolchain.

guenthert4y ago

As a real-time OS it is known for deterministic response times. If it were exceptionally fast (and licenses cheap enough), you'd see hosts in the TOP500 using it.

eggy4y ago

p_l4y ago

TOP500 is chock full of microkernels though, even if the "I/O nodes" would run Linux

guenthert4y ago

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