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QNX Hypervisor User's Guide
This User's Guide explains the QNX hypervisor architecture and provides instructions for installing and running a QNX Hypervisor system, changing system components and configuration, and using hypervisor features such as virtual devices (vdevs).
Monitoring and Troubleshooting
This chapter describes some tools and techniques you can use to monitor and troubleshoot your hypervisor system.
Getting a guest dump during a crash
You can configure your guest and the watchdog vdev in its VM to dump the guest's state in the event of a crash.

QNX Momentics IDE User's Guide
This User's Guide describes version 8.0 of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that's part of the QNX Tool Suite.
QNX Software Development Platform
QNX SDP is a cross-compiling and debugging environment, including an IDE and command-line tools, for building binary images and programs for target boards running the QNX OS 8.0.
QNX Software in the Cloud
QNX Software in the Cloud enables developers to use the QNX OS in the Amazon cloud environment.
QNX Toolkit for Visual Studio Code
This User's Guide describes the QNX^® Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. The guide introduces you to the QNX Toolkit by explaining the QNX development environment and how to build, run, and debug your QNX^® Operating System (OS) applications and systems.
QNX Hypervisor User's Guide
This User's Guide explains the QNX hypervisor architecture and provides instructions for installing and running a QNX Hypervisor system, changing system components and configuration, and using hypervisor features such as virtual devices (vdevs).
- Understanding QNX Virtual Environments
  QNX hypervisors are designed to meet the expectations of a hypervisor specified by the Popek/Goldberg Theorem.
- QNX Hypervisor: Protection Features
  This chapter explains the main features used by the QNX Hypervisor to protect itself and its guests. Many of these features are part of the design, while others are configurable.
- Configuration
  A QNX hypervisor, its qvm processes that create the VMs in which guests run, and these guests must be configured to work together.
- Building a QNX Hypervisor System
  This chapter explains how to build (assemble) a QNX Hypervisor system and transfer a bootable image to a supported target platform.
- Booting and Shutting Down
  This chapter describes how to boot and shut down the hypervisor host and guests in a QNX hypervisor system.
- Using Virtual Devices, Networking, and Memory Sharing
  This chapter describes how guests can discover and connect to vdevs and how they can use important hypervisor capabilities, such as networking and memory sharing.
- Monitoring and Troubleshooting
  This chapter describes some tools and techniques you can use to monitor and troubleshoot your hypervisor system.
  - Troubleshooting strategies
    There are numerous ways to get information about the different parts of your hypervisor system.
  - Viewing hypervisor activity
    After the hypervisor guest has booted, you can use QNX Momentics IDE to open a command terminal to either the host or a guest and then view its resource usage and activity.
  - Getting hypervisor trace information
    You can use the tracelogger utility and the QNX Momentics IDE System Profiler to capture and examine trace events from a VM.
  - Gathering information about a virtual machine
    QNX Hypervisor provides ways for gathering information about the VM running inside of a qvm process.
  - OS-VM configuration mismatch
    A guest may fail to start or not perform as expected if the VM in which it is running is not configured with the vdevs the guest OS expects to find.
  - Getting a guest dump during a crash
    You can configure your guest and the watchdog vdev in its VM to dump the guest's state in the event of a crash.
  - qvm process exit codes
    When a qvm process exits, the shell exit status indicates the reason for the exit.
- Performance Tuning
  This chapter describes common sources of overhead in a QNX hypervisor system, and strategies for reducing this overhead and optimizing system performance.
- VM Configuration Reference
  When you specify options to configure a qvm process, you are assembling and configuring the components of a virtual machine (VM) in which a guest will run.
- Virtual Device Reference
  This chapter presents the virtual devices (vdevs) delivered with QNX hypervisors, and describes how to configure these vdevs.
- Virtual Machine Firmware
  The virtual machines (VMs) in a QNX Hypervisor system provide a comprehensive firmware interface for guest OSs to manage VM power settings, access timers, and more.
- Utilities and Drivers Reference
  This chapter describes the utilities and drivers delivered with the QNX hypervisor.
- Terminology
  The following terms are used throughout the QNX hypervisor documentation.
Typographical Conventions, Support, and Licensing
This section describes the typographical conventions used throughout the documentation, explains how to obtain technical support, and provides some information about licensing.

Getting a guest dump during a crash

You can configure your guest and the watchdog vdev in its VM to dump the guest's state in the event of a crash.

This dump will provide you with the guest's state at the time that the watchdog intervened: the guest memory and its CPU registers (i.e., the vCPU registers in the hosting qvm process instance's vCPU threads).

To cause the guest to dump during a crash:

In the guest, add a watchdog kicker (e.g., wdtkick) and configure it to kick the virtual watchdog in the VM at the appropriate intervals (see wdtkick in the QNX OS Utilities Reference).
Add the appropriate watchdog vdev shared object to your hypervisor host's buildfile, and add the watchdog vdev to the hosting VM's configuration. QNX hypervisors include two watchdog vdevs: vdev wdt-sp805 (ARM) and vdev wdt-ib700 (x86).
Configure the watchdog vdev to dump if the guest fails to kick it within the specified time interval (see Watchdogs in the QNX Hypervisor: Protection Features chapter).
In the configuration for the hosting VM, specify the dump option so that it writes the hosted guest's dump to a file (see dump in the VM Configuration Reference chapter).

Page updated: August 11, 2025