Neutrino's microkernel approach

SMP is typically associated with high-end operating systems such as Unix and Windows NT running on high-end servers. These large monolithic systems tend to be quite complex, the result of many person-years of development. Since these large kernels contain the bulk of all OS services, the changes to support SMP are extensive, usually requiring large numbers of modifications and the use of specialized spinlocks throughout the code.

QNX Neutrino, on the other hand, contains a very small microkernel surrounded by processes that act as resource managers, providing services such as filesystems, character I/O, and networking. By modifying the microkernel alone, all other OS services will gain full advantage of SMP without the need for coding changes. If these service-providing processes are multithreaded, their many threads will be scheduled among the available processors. Even a single-threaded server would also benefit from an SMP system, because its thread would be scheduled on the available processors beside other servers and client processes.

As a testament to this microkernel approach, the SMP-enabled QNX Neutrino kernel/process manager adds only a few kilobytes of additional code. The SMP versions are designed for these main processor families:

The x86 version can boot on any system that conforms to the Intel MultiProcessor Specification (MP Spec) with up to 32 Pentium (or better) processors. QNX Neutrino also supports Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology found in P4 and Xeon processors.

The procnto-smp manager will also function on a single non-SMP system. With the cost of building a dual-processor Pentium motherboard very nearly the same as that for a single-processor motherboard, it's possible to deliver cost-effective solutions that can be scaled in the field by the simple addition of a second CPU. The fact that the OS itself is only a few kilobytes larger also allows SMP to be seriously considered for small CPU-intensive embedded systems, not just high-end servers.

The PowerPC and MIPS versions of the SMP-enabled kernel deliver full SMP support (e.g., cache-coherency, interprocessor interrupts, etc.) on appropriate PPC and MIPS hardware. The PPC version supports any SMP system with 7xx or 74xx series processors, as in such reference design platforms as the Motorola MVP or the Marvell EV-64260-2XMPC7450 SMP Development System. The MIPS version supports such systems as the dual-core Broadcom BCM1250 processor.