QNX

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. On
September 12 2007, the source of the QNX kernel was released for non-commercial use.

Description
As a microkernel-based OS, QNX is based on the idea of running most of the OS in the
form of a number of small tasks, known as servers. This differs from the more traditional
monolithic kernel, in which the operating system is a single very large program
composed of a huge number of "parts" with special abilities. In the case of QNX, the use
of a microkernel allows users (developers) to turn off any functionality they do not
require without having to change the OS itself; instead, those servers are simply not run.
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."
QNX Neutrino (2001) has been ported to a number of platforms and now runs on
practically any modern CPU that is used in the embedded market. This includes the x86
family, MIPS, PowerPC, SH-4 and the closely related family of ARM, StrongARM and
XScale CPUs.
As of September 12, 2007, QNX offers a free license for non-commercial users.

History
Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge, students at the University of Waterloo in 1980, both took a
standard computer science course in operating system design, in which the students
constructed a basic real-time kernel. Both were convinced there was a commercial need
for such a system, and moved to Kanata, Ontario, (a high-tech area in the western part of
Ottawa) to start Quantum Software Systems that year. In 1982 the first version, QNX,
was released for the Intel 8088 CPU.
One of QNX's first widespread uses was in the non-embedded world, when it was
selected as the operating system for the Ontario education system's own computer design,
the Unisys ICON. Over the years QNX was used mostly for "larger" projects, as its 44k
kernel was too large to fit inside the single-chip computers of the era. The system
garnered an enviable reputation for reliability and found itself in use running machinery
in a number of industrial applications.
In the late-1980s, Quantum realized that the market was rapidly moving towards the
POSIX model and decided to rewrite the kernel to be much more compatible at a lower
level. The result was QNX 4. During this time Patrick Hayden, while working as an
intern, along with Robin Burgener (a full time QNX employee at the time), developed a
new concept for a windowing systemHYPERLINK "http://www.pat2pdf.org/pat2pdf/
foo.pl?number=5745759" . This patented concept was developed into the embeddable
GUI named Photon microGUI. QNX also provided a version of the X Window System.
Due to the POSIX interface, porting Unix and BSD packages to QNX became much
easier.
Toward the end of the 1990s QNX began work on a completely new version of QNX,
designed from the ground up to be SMP capable, as well as support all current POSIX
APIs, and any new POSIX APIs that could be anticipated; but still retaining the
microkernel architecture. This resulted in QNX Neutrino, which was released in 2001.
Along with the Neutrino kernel, QNX made a serious commitment to tooling, and
became a founding member of the Eclipse consortium. QNX soon released a suite of
Eclipse plug-ins packaged with the Eclipse workbench under the name Momentics.
In 2004 the company announced it had been sold to Harman International Industries.
Prior to the acquisition by Harman International, QNX was already widely used in the
automotive industry for telematics systems. Since the purchase by Harman, QNX has
been designed into over 180 different automobile models.
On 12th of September 2007 QNX made a press release announcing the immediate
availability of the source code.
Cisco's IOS-XR (ultra high availability IOS), is based on QNX, as is IOS Software
Modularity.

Technology
The QNX kernel contains only CPU scheduling, interprocess communication, interrupt
redirection and timers. Everything else runs as a user process, including a special process
known as proc which performs process creation, and memory management by operating
in conjunction with the microkernel. This is made possible by two key mechanisms -
subroutine-call type interprocess communication, and a boot loader which can load an
image containing not only the kernel but any desired collection of user programs and
shared libraries.
QNX interprocess communication consists of sending a message from one process to
another and waiting for a reply. This is a single operation, called MsgSend. The message
is copied, by the kernel, from the address space of the sending process to that of the
receiving process. If the receiving process is waiting for the message, control of the CPU
is transferred at the same time, without a pass through the CPU scheduler. Thus, sending
a message to another process and waiting for a reply does not result in "losing one's turn"
for the CPU. This tight integration between message passing and CPU scheduling is one
of the key mechanisms that makes QNX message passing broadly usable. Most UNIX
and Linux interprocess communication mechanisms lack this tight integration, although
an implementation of QNX-type messaging for Linux does exist. Mishandling of this
subtle issue is a primary reason for the disappointing performance of some other
microkernel systems.
Due to the microkernel architecture QNX is also a distributed operating system. Dan
Dodge and Peter van der Veen hold a patent based on the QNX operating system's
distributed processing features (known commercially as Transparent Distributed
Processing).
All I/O operations, file system operations, and network operations were meant to work
through this mechanism, and the data transferred was copied during message passing.
Later versions of QNX reduce the number of separate processes and integrate the
network stack and other function blocks into single applications for performance reasons.
There are no device drivers in the kernel.
Message handling is prioritized by thread priority. Since I/O requests are performed using
message passing, high priority threads receive I/O service before low priority threads, an
essential feature in a hard real-time system.
The boot loader, although seldom discussed, is the other key component of the minimal
microkernel system. Because user programs can be built into the boot image, the set of
device drivers and support libraries needed for startup need not be, and are not, in the
kernel. Even such functions as program loading are not in the kernel, but instead are in
shared user-space libraries loaded as part of the boot image. It is possible to put an entire
boot image into ROM, which is used for diskless embedded systems.
Neutrino supports Symmetric Multiprocessing and Bound Multiprocessing(BMP), which
is QNX's term for being able to lock selected threads to selected CPUs. BMP is used to
improve cache hitting and to ease the migration of non-SMP safe applications to multi-
processor computers.
Neutrino supports strict priority-preemptive scheduling and Adaptive Partition
Scheduling(APS). APS guarantees minimum cpu percentages to selected groups of
threads, even though others may have higher priority. The adaptive partition scheduler is
still strictly priority-preemptive when the system is underloaded. It can also be
configured to run a selected set of critical threads strictly realtime, even when the system
is overloaded.

Foundry27
Foundry27, the new QNX community established by the company, will serve as a hub to
QNX Neutrino development where developers can register, choose the license, and get
the source code and the related toolkit of the RTOS.

Competitors
Some important competitors in the embedded market are LynxOS, VxWorks, Linux,
eCos, ThreadX, Windows CE, RTEMS, and OS-9.