Supported architectures, hardware, and guest OSs

The hypervisor comprises a hypervisor microkernel and one or more instances of the qvm process.

Supported hardware architectures

The hypervisor supports the following architectures and hardware:

ARM
ARMv8 with AArch64 hardware
x86
x86 with x86-64 hardware

CPU privilege levels

A CPU privilege level controls the access of the program currently running on a processor to resources such as memory regions, I/O ports, and special instructions. A guest runs at a lower privilege than the hypervisor microkernel, and applications running in that guest run at an even lower privilege. This architecture provides hardware-level safety from untrusted software components.

See also Exception Level (EL) and Ring in the Terminology appendix.

PCI support

The QNX Software Systems PCI vendor ID is 7173 (0x1C05). For more information about PCI Vendor IDs, see the PCI SIG web site at https://pcisig.com/. For more information about the QNX PCI Vendor ID, please contact your QNX representative.

Supported guest OSs

QNX hypervisors support QNX Neutrino OS, QNX OS for Safety (QOS) and Linux Ubuntu guests for the hardware architectures specified in Supported hardware architectures. These include:

Guest OSs must be compiled for the hardware architecture on which the hypervisor host is running. For example, ARM 32- and 64-bit guests can only run on AArch64 hardware.

For up-to-date information about the guest OSs your QNX hypervisor variant supports, see your hypervisor Release Notes.

64-bit and 32-bit guests

For both ARM and x86 platforms, the hypervisor host domain requires 64-bit hardware, but supports both 64-bit and 32-bit guests. Both 64-bit and 32-bit guest OSs may run in a single hypervisor system, provided that these guest OSs are supported. Guests may run as multi-core or single core; that is, a guest may run in a VM configured with a single virtual CPU (vCPU), or in a VM configured with multiple vCPUs.

If you need support for 32-bit guests such as the QNX Neutrino 6.6 OS, please contact your QNX representative.

Note:

The number of vCPUs in a VM affects performance. Adding vCPUs adds vCPU threads to the qvm process instance for the VM hosting the guest. It doesn't add CPUs to the hardware.

Increasing the number of vCPUs in a VM may cause performance to deteriorate (see Architecture and Virtual machines in this chapter, and the Performance Tuning chapter).