What is the QNX RTOS?

Since 1980, manufacturers have relied on QNX OS technology to power their mission-critical applications — everything from medical instruments and Internet routers to telematics devices, 9-1-1 call centers, process control applications, and air traffic control systems. Small or large, simple or distributed, these systems share an unmatched reputation for operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, nonstop. Time-tested and field-proven, the QNX Neutrino RTOS sets the industry standard for reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability.

What makes QNX Neutrino realtime operating system (RTOS) so remarkable? It's a true microkernel operating system. Under QNX Neutrino, every driver, application, protocol stack, and file system runs outside the kernel, in the safety of memory-protected user space. Fault resilience is built right in. As a result, virtually any component can fail — and be automatically restarted — without affecting other components or the kernel. No other commercial RTOS provides such protection.

Technology overview

The QNX Neutrino RTOS provides a comprehensive, integrated set of technologies to help quickly deliver robust, reliable embedded systems.

High availability solution
Process watchdog for application monitoring and recovery, self healing inter-process communications, and restartable device drivers and operating system services
Virtually any component, even a low-level driver, can fail without damaging the kernel or other components.
Process model ensures that if a component fails, QNX Neutrino can cleanly terminate it and reclaim any resources it was using — no need to reboot.
Essential networking technologies including IPv4, IPv6, IPSec, FTP, HTTP, SSH, Telnet and more
Photon microGUI — a full featured embedded graphical user interface
Integrated file systems for flash devices and rotating media
System visibility and debugging support
Supported by QNX Momentics, the Eclipse based integrated development environment
Full memory protection where the OS can immediately identify the component responsible, at the exact instruction
Instrumented kernel and visualization tools that trace system events including interrupts, thread state changes, synchronization, CPU utilization and more
Scalability
Scale large or small using only the desired components
Take advantage of built-in multiprocessing capabilities harness the power of multi-core processors
Simplify the design of fault-tolerant clusters with built-in transparent distributed processing
Portability
Maximize application portability with extensive support for the POSIX standard, which allows quick migration from Linux, Unix, and other open source programs
Target the best hardware platform for an embedded system and get up and running quickly with runtime support and BSPs for popular chipsets, including MIPS, PowerPC, SH-4, ARM, StrongArm, XScale, and x86
Field-tested binaries — drivers, applications, custom OS services, and so on — can be reused across entire product lines.

Help With QNX

1. Download Evaluation Momentics development suite