QNX Neutrino RTOS Overview

Since 1980, manufacturers have relied on QNX® RTOS technology to power their mission-critical applications — everything from medical instruments and Internet routers to telematics devices, 9-1-1 call centers, process control applications, and air traffic control systems. Small or large, simple or distributed, these systems share an unmatched reputation for operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, nonstop. Time-tested and field-proven, the QNX Neutrino RTOS sets the industry standard for reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability.

What makes QNX Neutrino realtime operating system (RTOS) so remarkable? It's a true microkernel operating system. Under QNX Neutrino, every driver, application, protocol stack, and file system runs outside the kernel, in the safety of memory-protected user space. Fault resilience is built right in. As a result, virtually any component can fail — and be automatically restarted — without affecting other components or the kernel. No other commercial RTOS provides such protection.

Technology overview

The QNX Neutrino RTOS provides a comprehensive, integrated set of technologies to help quickly deliver robust, reliable embedded systems.

• High availability solution
  • Process watchdog for application monitoring and recovery, self healing inter-process communications, and restartable device drivers and operating system services
  • Virtually any component, even a low-level driver, can fail without damaging the kernel or other components.
  • Process model ensures that if a component fails, QNX Neutrino can cleanly terminate it and reclaim any resources it was using — no need to reboot.
• Essential networking technologies including IPv4, IPv6, IPSec, FTP, HTTP, SSH, Telnet and more
• Advanced graphics with high performance direct-to-driver architecture 2D and 3D acceleration
• Photon microGUI — a full featured embedded graphical user interface
• Integrated file systems for flash devices and rotating media
• System visibility and debugging support
• Supported by QNX Momentics, the Eclipse based integrated development environment
• Full memory protection where the OS can immediately identify the component responsible, at the exact instruction
• Instrumented kernel and visualization tools that trace system events including interrupts, thread state changes, synchronization, CPU utilization and more
• Scalability
• Scale large or small using only the desired components
• Take advantage of built-in multiprocessing capabilities harness the power of multi-core processors
• Simplify the design of fault-tolerant clusters with built-in transparent distributed processing
• Portability
• Maximize application portability with extensive support for the POSIX standard, which allows quick migration from Linux, Unix, and other open source programs
• Target the best hardware platform for an embedded system and get up and running quickly with runtime support and BSPs for popular chipsets, including MIPS, PowerPC, SH-4, ARM, StrongArm, XScale, and x86
• Field-tested binaries — drivers, applications, custom OS services, and so on — can be reused across entire product lines.

See also: source, Multi-core, Security, Instant Device Activation, secure kernel, Realtime, Microkernel, High Availability, Networking, File Systems

Alternative terms: core rtos realtime microkernel source secure kernel embedded smp multicore api adaptive stack hybrid posix neutrino partitioning