Home
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.
Reference
The reference topics provide information about QNX Momentics IDE features and workflows that isn't covered in the chapters related to developing projects or debugging, testing, and analyzing applications.
Integrated tools
The IDE works with the GNU Debugger (GDB) and many runtime analysis tools, some of which are made by QNX and others by a third party. Using these tools, the IDE can report memory errors, heap usage, and function runtimes, and display kernel event trace data and target state information.
System Information
The QNX System Information perspective displays realtime statistics about a target machine and the processes running on it. This perspective contains many views that provide diverse and useful information about memory, CPU, and resource usage, and about process and thread interaction on the target.
Malloc Information
You can examine a process's heap through the Malloc Information view. This view illustrates heap usage and provides statistics such as allocation call counts and block counts for specific byte ranges.

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.
- Working with QNX Momentics IDE
  QNX Momentics IDE provides a graphical environment for developing, running, debugging, and profiling applications.
- Developing Projects with the IDE
  To use the QNX Momentics IDE to write applications targeted for QNX OS systems, you must define projects, which are containers that store your source code, configuration files, and binary files.
- Debugging Applications
  The IDE allows you to debug a running application, a library used by the application, or a core file.
- Unit Testing
  The IDE lets you use commercial test frameworks to write unit tests and then execute them by launching a project. While running a test program, you can use the Code Coverage tool to determine how much of the code is exercised (covered) by your tests.
- Analyzing Memory Usage and Finding Memory Problems
  QNX Momentics IDE lets you run Memory Analysis and several Valgrind (pronounced val-grinned) tools to find memory problems such as leaks and corruption, and to measure memory usage of programs. It also provides the QNX System Information perspective so you can learn which processes are consuming memory or other resources excessively.
- Analyzing Performance
  QNX Momentics IDE works with the Application Profiler and Valgrind (pronounced val-grinned) Cachegrind tools, which measure the performance of programs running on QNX targets. It also offers the QNX System Information perspective for viewing performance-related metrics.
- Analyzing System Behavior
  Many IDE tools allow you to find errors and optimize applications, but to ensure that your embedded system behaves well, you need to use system-wide diagnostic tools. The QNX System Information and QNX System Profiler tools help you understand process and thread interaction on the target, reduce application and system startup times, and debug deadlock and improper CPU usage levels.
- Building QNX OS Images
  Using the IDE's QNX System Builder feature, you can generate OS images, which are bootable images that contain startup code, the QNX OS, your applications, and any data files used by your applications. The IDE supports image building by allowing you to transfer an image to a target board.
- Reference
  The reference topics provide information about QNX Momentics IDE features and workflows that isn't covered in the chapters related to developing projects or debugging, testing, and analyzing applications.
  - Switching between SDKs
    QNX SDP provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for writing applications for QNX OS. In the QNX Momentics IDE, you can change the SDK selection to use a toolchain from a particular QNX SDP installation.
  - Configuring host-target communication
    The IDE on the host can communicate with target machines using an IP or a serial connection.
  - Supported target types
    This IDE release supports several target types. You can work with physical or virtual targets connected to the host by an IP or a serial link, or virtual machines (VMs) generated by the IDE.
  - QNX C/C++ Project properties
    For projects that use managed recursive makefiles, the build settings are defined through the UI and the IDE regenerates the makefiles whenever you change these settings.
  - QNX perspectives
    Perspectives control which views are shown in the IDE and how they are laid out. The IDE contains many perspectives that support application and system analysis for QNX OS targets.
  - Editors
    Editors control how you interact with project files that are opened in the editor pane.
  - Build configurations
    When you run a project through the launch bar, the IDE builds the project, if necessary, before running the binary on the target. The commands used for compiling and linking are determined by the active build configuration.
  - Adding debug symbols and instrumentation code to binaries
    The active build configuration determines which make commands are used to compile and link binaries in the current project. To debug and analyze your program with certain tools, you must define the right options in those commands.
  - Creating a non-QNX project
    The IDE lets you create any project type supported by the C/C++ Development Toolkit (CDT) in the Eclipse platform.
  - Managing launch configurations
    Launch configurations store settings related to program execution, setup, or analysis. When you create a project, the IDE generates a default launch configuration for it. But you can create your own configurations when you need to customize how a project runs and reuse those custom settings.
  - Integrated tools
    The IDE works with the GNU Debugger (GDB) and many runtime analysis tools, some of which are made by QNX and others by a third party. Using these tools, the IDE can report memory errors, heap usage, and function runtimes, and display kernel event trace data and target state information.
    - Application Profiler
      Application Profiler is a QNX tool that allows you to view the profiling results generated by instrumented binaries that run on a QNX OS target. The results tell you who called each function as well as how often, how long was spent in each function, and how much CPU time individual lines of codes used. This helps you locate inefficient areas in your code without following its execution line by line.
    - Code Coverage
      The Code Coverage tool provides information about which lines of code have been executed. This tool is useful during testing because it tells you whether the code coverage of your test plan is acceptable.
    - Memory Analysis
      Memory Analysis is a QNX tool that uses the debug version of the memory allocation library (librcheck) to track heap memory, validate pointer arguments to C library functions, and detect memory corruption. This tool displays data received from the librcheck library about memory events and problems that occur in an active application.
    - System Information
      The QNX System Information perspective displays realtime statistics about a target machine and the processes running on it. This perspective contains many views that provide diverse and useful information about memory, CPU, and resource usage, and about process and thread interaction on the target.
      - APS View
        The APS View displays information about the adaptive partitioning scheduling (APS) on a target.
      - Connection Information
        The Connection Information view shows the file descriptors, server processes, and IO flags for the connections used by the process selected in the Target Navigator view. For some connections, it also shows the pathname of the resource accessed through the connection.
      - Malloc Information
        You can examine a process's heap through the Malloc Information view. This view illustrates heap usage and provides statistics such as allocation call counts and block counts for specific byte ranges.
      - Memory Information
        The Memory Information view gives an overview about the memory allocation pattern for a process. Specifically, it displays a memory distribution map and information about each segment.
      - Process Information
        The Process Information view provides runtime details about processes and threads. For this view, information is shown for each process selected in the Target Navigator.
      - Signal Information
        The Signal Information view lets you track the signals sent to the process selected in the Target Navigator view.
      - System Resources
        You can track the resource usage of target processes through the System Resources view. Specifically, this view lets you compare the CPU, memory, or file descriptor usage of different processes.
      - System Summary
        The System Summary view provides information about the overall state of a target. This information includes specifications of the target machine, system-wide memory usage, and a listing of active processes that includes performance statistics.
      - Target File System Navigator
        The Target File System Navigator lets you easily copy files between your host and a filesystem residing on a target machine.
      - Target Navigator
        The Target Navigator lists the targets and, for the connected ones, the processes running on them. Through this view's controls, you can configure kernel event tracing and adaptive partitioning for targets and send signals to processes, attach the debugger to them, and adjust their scheduling properties.
    - System Profiler
      The QNX System Profiler perspective displays kernel event trace data. Through the editor, you can view different aspects of the kernel activity and examine a time range of events in detail. There are also several views that list helpful information such as the order of events, thread state event statistics, and runtimes for client and server threads.
    - Valgrind
      Valgrind (pronounced val-grinned) is a third-party tool suite that supports runtime analysis of programs. The IDE provides controls for configuring some of these tools, allowing you to track a program's dynamic memory operations, measure its heap usage, and more.
  - Updating the IDE
    The IDE includes an auto-update feature that lets you check for and install updates to the IDE itself.
  - System Profiler: user event formatting XML reference
    This reference document defines attributes of the datakey specifier. For a detailed guide that walks through several examples, go to Formatting user events with the System Profiler.
- JTAG: Debugging with Lauterbach TRACE32
  The Lauterbach TRACE32® In-Circuit Debugger (TRACE32-ICD) supports the JTAG onchip interface so you can perform hardware debugging of QNX OS systems through the QNX Momentics IDE.
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).
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.

Malloc Information

QNX Tool SuiteIntegrated Development Environment User's GuideDeveloperSetup

You can examine a process's heap through the Malloc Information view. This view illustrates heap usage and provides statistics such as allocation call counts and block counts for specific byte ranges.

Leaving this view open lets you monitor a process's heap activity and memory usage. The data come from the general-purpose process-level allocator, so there's no application overhead when the IDE retrieves them. To display the data, the view uses multiple panes, which are described below.

Screenshot of Malloc Information view showing bar graphs of heap distribution, allocation and free requests, and block statistics for various size ranges

Note:

The screenshot above represents a system targeting SDP 7.1. In an SDP 8.0 target, there's less data available. Continue reading below to understand what's changed.
All three panes—Overview, Distribution, and Charts—are shown by default but you can hide any of them by deselecting the corresponding options in the dropdown in the upper right corner.

Overview

This top pane provides statistics about activity for the entire heap, in multiple panels.

Total Allocator Managed Memory

This panel contains a bar that indicates the used and free heap space, in color-coded format:

Used (purple)
Free (lavender)

This bar graph quickly tells you whether the process is running low on heap space. You can hover the pointer over a section to see a tooltip stating the purpose and size of the corresponding memory area (e.g., used space for small blocks, overhead for metadata of large blocks).

The total heap size is displayed next to the title. Here, the numbers shown are exact measurements that come from the allocation library, unlike with the Memory Information and System Resources views, which display estimates.

Calls Made

The numbers of malloc() and free() calls made by the process are given in this panel. The number of realloc() calls isn't available in an SDP 8.0 target.

Core Requests

This panel doesn't show statistics in an SDP 8.0 target.

Distribution

This pane doesn't show statistics in an SDP 8.0 target.

Charts

This bottom pane only displays data for the Overview History, which represents a timeline of the heap usage snapshots shown in the Total Allocator Managed Memory panel. This bar graph automatically rescales as the process increases its total heap size.

Page updated: March 05, 2025