March 27, 2026
Open source meets open season
QRV Operating System: QNX on RISC-V
Nerds Revive a ‘Zombie’ OS While Fighting Over AI and Begging BlackBerry to Set It Free
TLDR: A lone developer just got a QNX-inspired operating system running on modern hardware, and the crowd immediately turned it into a movement, urging BlackBerry to open the old code. When some complained about AI-flavored writing and others vowed to rewrite the secret parts by hand, it became a full-on nerd rebellion.
A one-person passion project just booted a tiny new operating system called QRV, reviving a classic industrial system (QNX) on a new chip design. That alone is hardcore nerd romance. But the real fireworks are in the comments, where the community instantly turns it into a mix of open‑source revolution, AI backlash, and “we’ll do it ourselves” energy.
One camp is rallying the troops with “sign the petition” vibes, begging BlackBerry (which owns QNX) to re‑license the old software so the world can have a free, modern, microkernel-based system — think “safer, more stable” OS that doesn’t belong to a tech giant. User ymz5 is basically leading a mini‑uprising, pushing an online petition and already talking about backup plans.
Then someone slams the brakes on the celebratory mood and goes after AI writing, complaining that the post reads like it’s been fed through a robot thesaurus. They demand: if you’re going to use AI, at least make it write like Hemingway — short, sharp, and not drowning in buzzwords. It’s the most 2020s nerd fight imaginable: open‑source dreamers vs AI style police, all while another commenter calmly says, don’t worry, if BlackBerry says no, we’ll just rewrite the secret bits from scratch. No drama in the original post? Don’t worry, the comments brought their own.
Key Points
- •QRV v0.16 boots to a working shell on QEMU with pwd, echo, and ls functioning and proper error handling for unknown commands.
- •The first dynamically linked user-space program runs and exits through the full QNX-style IPC stack in v0.16.
- •Patches and a build script for QRV v0.16 are published on GitHub at https://github.com/r-tty/qrv.
- •Reaching the v0.16 milestone required five to six days of intensive debugging using logs and trace outputs with incremental fixes.
- •The project’s roots trace back to RadiOS (1998–2015), which pivoted to a QNX-compatible microkernel influenced by L4 and QNX 6.1, achieved message-passing milestones, but later slowed and ended.