QNX Technical Articles

Date of this edition: December 8, 2021

Target OS: This update is compatible with targets that are running QNX^® Neutrino^® that's based on QNX Software Development Platform 7.1.

Host OS: To install this update, you must have installed the QNX Software Development Platform 7.1 on one of the following development hosts:

• Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, or Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
• macOS version 10.14 or 10.15
• Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 64-bit, or Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 LTS 64-bit, on x86_64 processors (QNX SDP isn't supported on Linux on ARM processors)

Contents

• What's in this update?
• New and enhanced features
• Fixed issues
• Known issues
• Technical support

Throughout this document, you may see reference numbers associated with particular issues, changes, etc. When corresponding with our Technical Support staff about a given issue, please quote the relevant reference number. You might also find the reference numbers useful for tracking issues as they become fixed.

What's in this update?

This update includes the following packages found under Updates -> QNX Software Development Platform or Available -> QNX Software Development Platform:

To see a list of the contents of a package, right-click it in the QNX Software Center, choose Properties, and then click Package Contents.

New and enhanced features

General filesystems

• The Power-Safe filesystem crypto= option, which enables or disables encryption support, now takes a tag defined in the qcrypto library configuration file instead of the values openssl or certicom. (Ref# J2897238)
• To improve power management, filesystem periodic timers are now completely stopped when not in use. (Ref# J2875570)
• When an application opens a new file, the io-blk module now avoids making an unnecessary kernel call. (Ref# J2873757)
• The io-blk module now verifies the GPT array checksum when it scans for a partition table on a disk (usually when the driver starts). (Ref# J2747595)
• The Ext2 filesystem (fs-ext2.so) now supports 256-byte inodes. (Ref# J2871822)
• Customers can now add the inherit-runmask command-line option to io-blk.so. For more information, see the description of _NTO_CHF_INHERIT_RUNMASK in the ChannelCreate() entry in the C Library Reference. (Ref# J2892011)
• The devb-loopback driver can now run as non-root. (Ref# J2790652)
• The io-blk.so manager no longer allocates memory for transfer requests from the DMA memory pool. (Ref# J2906197)
• The Ext2 filesystem now supports files larger than 2 GB. (Ref# J2524612)
• The Power-Safe filesystem now uses QNX the cryptography library (qcrypto) for all cipher operations. Systems require libqcrypt.so to use encryption. The cipher initialization calls that qcrypto requires for setting up algorithms can decrease throughput of encrypted file accesses. (Ref# J2648888)

QNX Trusted Disk (QTD)

• QNX Trusted Disk (QTD) now supports the eddsa-25519 and eddsa-448 cryptographic signature algorithms (pure version). For more information, see the mkqfs entry in the Utilities Reference. (Ref# J2877418)
• The new qtdctl utility allows you to interact with QNX Trusted Disk (QTD) partitions. For more information, see its entry in the Utilities Reference. (Ref# J2812341)
• QTD performance has been improved. (Ref# J2872305, J2722244)
• QTD now supports the blake3 digest algorithm. (Ref# J2814124)

Fixed issues

• Fixed an issue that caused block-oriented (devb-*) drivers to crash when memory was low. (Ref# J2891859)
• An issue that in some cases caused the filename in an inotify watch to have a superfluous trailing byte has been fixed. (Ref# J2877295)
• The fdisk utility now allows you to create a logical partition inside of an extended partition when the new logical partition is not the last one. (Ref# J2870830)
• On 64-bit CPUs, io-blk now correctly handles read and write operations larger than 4 GB. (Ref# J2798001)
• Mounting a read-write DOS filesystem image that is stored on a Power-Safe filesystem no longer corrupts the Power-Safe filesystem. (Ref# J2898390)
• Fixed an issue related to sparse file support that caused the Power-Safe filesystem to crash the devb-* driver. (Ref# J2897715)
• Fixed an issue where a partition that had been reformatted to a different filesystem type could not be successfully mounted because it contained remnants of the previous filesystem. (Ref# J2805029)
• An Ext2 filesystem no longer causes the devb-* driver to crash when it accesses an inline symlink. (Ref# J2542329)
• Fixed a memory leak issue that occurred when accessing a very large number of files on any filesystem hosted by devb-*. (Ref# J2894324)
• When SMMU is enabled, the devb-* driver now sends a complete list of addresses to SMMUMAN. (Ref# J2876338)
• Fixed a read-write error that could occur when using openfd() multiple times against a raw partition. (Ref# J2890978)
• The permission checks made by the Power-Safe filesystem encryption device-control (devctl()) commands are now stricter. (Ref# J2892692)
• Fixed an issue with forced unmounting of filesystems that are hosted by devb-*. (Ref# J2879156)
• Fixed an issue on some QNX hypervisor configurations that caused direct I/O to fail. (Ref# J2878846)
• Fixed an issue where de-fragmenting a sparse file could corrupt a Power-Safe filesystem. (Ref# J2520068)
• Relaxed some sanity checks in pted related to a protected Master Boot Record (MBR). (Ref# J2715847)
• The pted utility now accepts a valid GPT disk that is created with less than 128 entries. (Ref# J2747430)
• Improved the sanity checking of user input performed by pted. (Ref# J2902572)
• The QTD option -C that is provided by mkqfs now works as expected. (Ref# J2897740)
• Fixed an issue that allowed pathtrust to be bypassed. (Ref# J2892187)
• QTD can now be used with images larger than 4GB. (Ref# J2891006)
• On 32-bit targets, fixed an issue where the QTD on-mount verification did not detect corruption on 4 GB or larger files. (Ref# J2906017)

Known issues

None currently known.

Technical support

For information about technical support for any QNX product, go to the Developers menu on our website (www.qnx.com). You'll find a wide range of support options, including community forums.