Networking

QNX Neutrino RTOS supports IPv4/IPv6 over Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi 802.11 and provides the standard complement of network services, including DNS, DHCP, inetd, firewall, FTP, TFTP, HTTP, Telnet, PPP, NFS, and NTP. With its support for POSIX APIs, it's a simple task to incorporate other open-source networking components (e.g., Asterisk for VoIP).

As part of our vehicle reference implementations, QNX Software Systems provides a full Wi-Fi access point that can be used in conjunction with a Bluetooth-capable mobile phone to provide an Internet gateway, which can then be used throughout the cab of the vehicle.

As a distributed OS, the QNX Neutrino RTOS uses an underlying networking approach known as Transparent Distributed Processing (TDP, also known as Qnet). All Qnet-connected nodes can share devices and OS resources. For example, every node on a network can transparently communicate with a Bluetooth-connected phone, even if the node doesn't have a Bluetooth interface. This provides overall cost savings by reducing the memory footprint and by removing additional software costs.

The QNX concept Porsche car provides another example. The car has a multimedia library that runs on the head unit. The two Rear Seat Entertainment (RSE) units are able to share this library. On the head unit, the library is accessed through a POSIX path such as /db/mmlibrary.db. When accessed from the two RSE units, the path for this resource would be /net/headunit/db/mmlibrary.db. The simplicity of TDP allows the underlying source code to remain the same. Only the resource path changes, even when accessing resources across the network. Note that the name change can be avoided by using a symbolic link.