Meet the New OS

• Architecture
• Support for x86, MIPS, PowerPC
• SMP
• Portability
• Neutrino on a QNX 4 box
  • Moving files from QNX 4 to Neutrino

Architecture

Architecturally, Neutrino is the same as QNX 4. It provides an open-systems POSIX API in a robust scalable form suitable for a wide range of solutions - from tiny resource-constrained systems to high-end distributed computing environments.

Support for x86, MIPS, PowerPC

One big difference between QNX 4 and Neutrino is that the new OS runs on a number of different processors - x86, MIPS, PowerPC (with support for additional processors to follow). Assuming that you didn't use any processor-specific tricks, a program written for Neutrino on an x86 could be recompiled and relinked so that it will also run on a Power PC machine.

SMP

Neutrino can also run on a multi-processor machine. This machine might have 4 Gbytes of physical memory managed by a number of processors.

Portability

Neutrino was also designed to be even more portable than QNX 4. The new OS contains newer POSIX components (e.g. POSIX threads). New functions from the Unix 98 standard and from other sources have been added.

Installing Neutrino on a QNX 4 box

You install Neutrino onto a QNX 4 hard disk partition using a Product Suite CD-ROM. Since this step-by-step process is documented in the installation notes that came with your software, we won't need to go into detail on the steps here.

Moving files from QNX 4 to Neutrino

Migrating files from a QNX 4 system to a Neutrino system isn't complicated for this simple reason: they use the same filesystem. If you're going to run Neutrino on a PC with a QNX 4 filesystem, then all the files in the QNX 4 partition or disk are accessed exactly the same as they were before.

In fact, you could replace your /.boot or /.altboot file with a Neutrino bootable image and reboot into the new OS.

Typical development cycle

Many developers may want to have their Neutrino target machine act as an NFS or CIFS client; this is certainly possible.

Using this scheme, you can set up a QNX 4 development system and a Neutrino target system that has access to the QNX 4 files. With two machines side-by-side, a typical development cycle becomes:

From the QNX 4 machine:

1. Edit.
2. Compile.
3. Link.

From the Neutrino machine:

Run.