QNX mainly known as a Real-Time Operating System that is both full-featured and robust, but can also scale down to meet the constrained resource requirements of realtime embedded systems. It features a UNIX like environment, microkernel based design and POSIX compliance. There are other software products that now carry the name QNX.
QNX is the name of a family of products focused on real time and safety critical embedded systems written by QNX Software Systems. It is most widely associated with the Real Time Operating Systems of the same name, but their portfolio has expanded to include development systems, middleware and services under the name QNX. Some examples include:
RIM own QNX Software Systems and their development tools, such as the QNX Momentics IDE (based on Eclipse) and qcc compiler (based on gcc), are provided as the Native Development Kit for the Blackberry Tablet. The Blackberry Tablet OS runs on top of the QNX Neutrino RTOS.
Software going under the name of QNX
RTOS
QNX is most famous for being the Real Time Operating System of which there are two versions: QNX RTOS v4 is an older product but is still used in many existing systems and still supported by the company. More recently QNX Neutrino RTOS (v6) was released. It is based on a microkernel architecture, modular design and message passing to make it robust and scalable.
HMI and Graphics
QNX Core Graphics provides underlying libraries that developers can target for hardware accelerated 2D and 3D rendering with little CPU overhead (based on OpenGL ES) or the need for screen/widget builder tools.
QNX Photon microGUI is a windowing system for small embedded HMIs providing the developer with a widget toolkit, callback based event handlers and remote graphical connections via Phindows.
Multimedia
QNX Aviage is a pair of frameworks for multimedia applications and acoustic processing. The multimedia suite allows you to create anything from simple media players to in-car entertainment systems. The acoustics processing suite focuses on improving voice communications (such as in-car telephony) and recognition.
Development Tools
QNX Momentics is the name of the development suite that QNX provides to target its RTOSes and libraries. It is based on Eclipse as the IDE and gcc as the toolchain, but there are many other tools included such as a system builder (for building and configuring your embedded system image), application/system profiler and memory analysis.
What kinds of questions should have this tag?
This tag should be applied to questions which are asking about programming for the QNX RTOSes, using the QNX development tools or are programming against the QNX libraries, middleware APIs or frameworks.
Questions about using the QNX development software to target the Blackberry Tablet OS Native development kit are suitable for this tag. Questions specifically about the Blackberry Tablet OS should probably not have this tag unless you are coding directly against the underlying QNX Neutrino RTOS APIs.
Important Links
- QNX Software Systems (http://www.qnx.com): Homepage of QNX and where you will find official information about the QNX products
- Foundry27 (http://community.qnx.com/sf/sfmain/do/home): QNX provided community resources such as forums
- Blackberry Native SDK (http://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/native/): The starting point for developing for the Blackberry Tablet OS using the QNX development tools.
- OpenQNX (http://www.openqnx.com/): Independant forums for news and discussion about QNX.
