QNX Archive

A long, long time ago, back when running BeOS as my main operating system had finally become impossible, I had a short stint running QNX as my one and only operating system. In 2004, before I joined OSNews and became its managing editor, I also wrote and published an article about QNX on OSNews, which is cringe-inducing to read over two decades later (although I was only 20 when I wrote that – I should be kind to my young self). Sadly, the included screenshots have not survived the several transitions OSNews has gone through since 2004. Anyway, back in those days, it was entirely possible to use QNX as a general purpose desktop operating system, mostly because of two things. First, the incredible Photon MicroGUI, an excellent and unique graphical environment that was a joy to use, and two, because of a small but dedicated community of enthousiasts, some of which QNX employees, who ported a ton of open source applications, from basic open source tools to behemoths like Thunderbird, the Mozilla Suite, and Firefox, to QNX. It even came with an easy-to-use package manager and associated GUI to install all of these applications without much hassle. Using QNX like this was a joy. It really felt like a tightly controlled, carefully crafted user experience, despite desktop use being so low on the priority list for the company that it might as well have not been on there at all. Not long after, I think a few of the people inside QNX involved with the QNX desktop community left the company, and the entire thing just fizzled out afterwards when the company was acquired by Harman Kardon. Not long after, it became clear the company lost all interest, a feeling only solidified once Blackberry acquired the company. Somewhere in between the company released some of its code under some not-quite-open-source license, accompanied by a rather lacklustre push to get the community interested again. This, too, fizzled out. Well, it seems the company is trying to reverse course, and has started courting the enthusiast community once again. This time, it’s called QNX Everywhere, and it involves making QNX available for non-commercial use for anyone who wants it. No, it’s not open source, and yes, it requires some hoops to jump through still, but it’s better than nothing. In addition, QNX also put a bunch of open source demos, applications, frameworks, and libraries on GitLab. One of the most welcome new efforts is a bootable QNX image for the Raspberry Pi 4 (and only the 4, sadly, which I don’t own). It comes with a basic set of demo application you can run from the command line, including a graphical web browser, but sadly, it does not seem to come with Photon microGUI or any modern equivalent. I’m guessing Photon hasn’t seen a ton of work since its golden days two decades ago, which might explain why it’s not here. There’s also a list of current open source ports, which includes chunks of toolkits like GTK and Qt, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Honestly, as cool as this is, it seems it’s mostly aimed at embedded developers instead of weird people who want to use QNX as a general purpose operating system, which makes total sense from QNX’ perspective. I hope Photon microGUI will make a return at some point, and it would be awesome – but I expect unlikely – if QNX could be released as open source, so that it would be more likely a community of enthusiasts could spring up around it. For now, without much for a non-developer like me to do with it, it’s not making me run out to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 just yet.

Way back in the day, back when I wasn’t even working at OSNews yet, I used to run QNX as my desktop operating system, together with a small number of other enthusiasts. It was a struggle, for sure, but it was fun, exciting, and nobody else was crazy enough to do so. Sadly, the small QNX desktop community wasn’t even remotely interesting to QNX, and later Blackberry when they acquired the company, and eventually the stand-alone Neutrino-powered version of QNX disappeared behind confusing signup screens and other dark patterns. It meant the end of our small little community. Much to my utter surprise and delight, I saw a post by js about how he ported GCC 10 to QNX – in this case, to QNX 6.5 SP1, released in 2012 – and submitted it to pkgsrc. His ultimate goal is to port one of his other projects, ObjFW, to QNX. He makes use of pkgsrc to do this kind of work, which also means he had to make pkgsrc bootstrap and a lot of other software work on QNX. We’re at QNX 8.0 by now, and as much as I bang my head against QNX and BlackBerry’s wall of marketing and corporate speak, I just can’t find out if it’s even still possible to download QNX Neutrino and install it on real generic hardware today.

Via Hackaday: has a Subaru, a car that has an all-in-one entertainment system head unit that is typical of what you’d find across a host of manufacturers. His account of jailbreaking it is a lengthy essay and a fascinating read for anyone. He starts with a serial port, then an SSH prompt for a root password, and a bit of searching to find it was made by Harman and that it runs the closed-source realtime OS QNX. From there he finds an official Subaru update, from which he can slowly peel away the layers and deduce the security mechanism. The write-up lays bare his techniques, for example at one point isolating the ARM assembler for a particular function and transplanting it bodily into his own code for investigation. A very good account of this obscure jailbreaking adventure.

This scientific article is not for people with short attention spans.

That's an incredible amount of marketing speak for such a short paragraph, and sadly, the official press release isn't much better. QNX let go of what small enthusiast support among hobbyists it had almost a decade ago, and at this point it's so buzzworded up I barely recognise it anymore.

This was a long, long time ago.

A mutex is a common type of lock used to serialize concurrent access by multiple threads to shared resources. While support for POSIX mutexes in the QNX Neutrino Realtime OS dates back to the early days of the system, this area of the code has seen considerable changes in the last couple of years.

QNX 6.6 has been released. There are quite a lot of changes, but - sady - I doubt many of us work with QNX itself. It's quite popular in the embedded world, and, of course forms the foundation for BB10 - which has not exactly been a stellar success. Anywho, there's a pretty big change in 6.6:

Photon has been such a core part of QNX' identity for me that it's kind of weird to see it go.

Yes, Apple CarPlay runs on QNX. Makes sense - I'm guessing (?) in-car software needs a lot of certification and testing, which QNX' in-car platforms all already have.

According to a Computerworld article, BlackBerry is exploring putting itself up for sale, as the company falls into 4th place in the mobile market. IDC statistics that show Android leads the mobile market with nearly 80%, iOS has 13.2%, Windows Phone 3.7%, and BlackBerry 2.9%. Gartner analyst Bill Menezes states that even new ownership is "not going to address how the company restores itself."

One key asset BlackBerry owns is QNX, the real-time based OS it bought in 2010. QNX is microkernel based, versus the monolithic kernel used by many OS's like Linux. BlackBerry bases its tablet and phone OS's on QNX, which also remains a popular commercial OS for embedded systems.

Since QNX - understandably - lost any and all interest in general-purpose computing, I kind of lost track where it was going (I used to have such fun with it - yup, 2004, before I even joined OSNews). Apparently, they just released version 6.5 SP1. It contains optimised memory performance, better networking and USB stacks, improved file system performance, and more. I'm sure these are all things we'll see trickle down to BlackBerry OS 10.

RIM has pushed the second update of the QNX-based operating system running on the PlayBook. One of the new features listed? "The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet can now be charged even when fully powered down." Oh my.

When Research In Motion unveiled its BlackBerry Playbook tablet on Monday, including the new QNX-based operating system it runs, I already speculated that it would probably make its way onto RIM's smartphones as well. RIM has now confirmed this suspicion.

QNX Software has posted a page for its 30th anniversary, noting 30 ways that QNX touches your life (whether you know about it or not. It includes QNX's use in high capacity routers, power generation systems, emergency dispatch systems, OnStar, navigation systems, warehouse automation, television broadcasting systems, trains and planes, and many more.

Well, I have to admit I didn't see this one coming. Not too long ago, QNX Software Systems was acquired by Harman International (Harman/Kardon and JBL), and now, six years later, the embedded software specialist has been bought by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Interesting acquisition.