QNX Archive

For some inexplicable reason I missed the fact that one of my favourite operating systems saw a new release last month. On May 28 QNX Software Systems released QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 and the associated Momentics Tool Suite, also at version 6.4.1. Even though it's a point release, there's some really cool and new stuff in here.

If there is one operating system that has a special place in my heart, it's QNX. This microkernel operating system served as my main desktop operating system for months and months back in the day, during the short-lived QNX Desktop scene - which died out due to a lack of interest from QNX' parent company, QNX Software Systems. The money is in the embedded and high reliability markets, and that's where QSS - understandably - focused its efforts. QNX was sort-of open sourced in September 2007, and today the company has announced the release of QNX 6.4, the first major release since 6.3 in 2004.

A few years ago, I was an avid QNX user. I used the non-commercial desktop version of this wonderfully clean and elegant pure-microkernel operating system for a long period of time, as a desktop operating system. I liked the whole style of this operating system, its Photon user interface, and its excellent package management system. I even wrote a three-page article about it. Sadly, QSS, the company behind QNX, lost all interest in the non-commercial desktop version, and ditched it, leaving only a hard-to-find 30-day evaluation version alive. Community interest dwindled, and so did mine. Despite my lost interest, it saddened me today to learn that QNXZone.com, a community portal for QNX, has been shut down. Read on for a few short thoughts.

SciTech Software recently released a public beta of SciTech SNAP Graphics for QNX Neutrino. It includes a driver for the Photon GUI environment, as well as support for running SciTech MGL and SNAP graphical console applications. Some pre-built demos are available, as well an updated release of the SNAP Graphics SDK for developers who wish to create their own applications.

Building on the foundation of Open Watcom debugger cross-platform tools, SciTech Software has extended debugger support for QNX Neutrino x86 targets . In this whitepaper they describe some of the debugger's features and they challenges the team had to make it work.

In today's entry in our Alternative OS Contest, James Ingraham takes a close look at QNX, the operating system based on the Neutrino microkernel. He concludes that "While you can probably find solutions for just about all of your desktop computing needs using the QNX RTOS, that is not QNX's strong suit. Its focus is real-time, embedded, and mission critical applications." Read on for the whole article.

QNX (pronounced either Q-N-X or Q-nix) is a commercial POSIX-compliant Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The system is quite small, fitting in a minimal fashion on a single floppy, and is considered to be both very fast and fairly "complete." But how does it perform? Stuart Goddard submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which shows his experiences after installing version 6.3 of the operating system. Update: The story was removed at osViews.

QNX Software Systems Co. unveiled a new source-code product that will shorten the development cycle and increase design flexibility for developers using the QNX Neutrino RTOS.

There is an article over at OpenQNX about a possible new desktop for QNX Neutrino. Elsewhere, check the VxWorks-to-QNX porting guide news.

In this article, we will explore the creation of a custom widget for an automotive application using the Zinzala SDK. Introduced in April 2003, Zinzala is a BeOS flavored Software Development Kit for QNX. It has improved since then, taking on small features inspired by the Symbian OS. Because Zinzala brings in the benefits of object oriented programming, it can leverage the quality of your QNX RTOS based embedded products.

I think that everyone reading OSNews will have heard at least something about QNX. You can regard this article as an introduction, but also as a review, and as a "Is-QNX-Ready-For-The-Desktop? article". To start off, I put together a short explanation of the merits of using a microkernel. Let me start off by saying that QNX Software Systems (QSS) does not aim towards the desktop with their Neutrino RTOS.

Harman (maker of Harman Kardon and JBL audio gears) has bought QNX.

QNX just announced the SMP kit. The Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) Technology Development Kit allows you to achieve greater scalability, system density and performance in compute-intensive systems, such as network elements, encryption/decryption, transportation, medical imaging, storage.

The recently released QNX 6.3 is now available for a test run by developers. It doesn't seem to be a fully free for no commercial purposes no-IDE version of QNX RtP anymore.