I'm looking for any suggestions, and especially any real experiences, that anyone cares to offer.
We have a system that includes an x86 box running QNX 6.something. It has the following interfaces:
-- network card for product specific data acquisition, 100 base T or faster
-- network card to user workstation (Windows XP based), 100 base T or faster
-- USB 2.0 high speed interface to machine control
-- Monitor output, 1024 X 768 32-bit color
-- Standard PC serial port to receive input from touch screen integrated into above LCD monitor
-- Standard keyboard and mouse, used by service techs only during service and updates, not the normal users
-- A CD or DVD drive for installing and upgrading the system
We are looking at the possibility of moving the QNX system and application into a virtual machine on the workstation, which will be a quad core, dedicating one core to QNX. We are not looking to change the QNX system significantly or more it to another RTOS. There are many years of development and use. The QNX application has some real time requirements, mostly related to the data acquisition, and injecting timing date from the USB interface into the Ethernet acquisition stream.
This is not really my part of the system, but the people working on the Windows/QNX side asked me to see if I could find any options that they might have missed.
They looked at Tenasys, but apparently that only runs QNX headless, so it couldn't do the user GUI/touch screen functions.
They say VMware would work, but it is more expensive than they would like.
So I would appreciate any experiences anyone has to share about actually running QNX 6 under any x86 VM along with Windows and achieving real time performance.
TIA,