BlackBerry releases QNX Hypervisor 2.2, with richer features and greater flexibility

BlackBerry recently officially released the latest version of its real-time embedded hypervisor product, QNX® Hypervisor 2.2.

With QNX Hypervisor 2.2, design flexibility and scalability are maximized, allowing manufacturers and other embedded system suppliers to consolidate multiple systems with mixed criticality and different operating environments onto the same hardware platform. This helps reduce the initial development cost and long-term cost of ownership of a wide range of embedded systems, from rail and robotic controllers to vehicle digital cockpits and battery management ECUs.

Based on QNX® Neutrino® real-time operating system (RTOS) 7.1, QNX Hypervisor 2.2 supports the latest chip enhancements for interrupt control, scalable vector extensions (SVE) and encryption technology and security enhancements. At the same time, the new version also provides users with other features, such as quickly starting key system services before the guest is launched, and priority-based hardware resource and device sharing. Like previous QNX Hypervisor versions, QNX Hypervisor 2.2 also adds information entropy sources and provides rich VIRTIO shared device support.

QNX Hypervisor 2.2 provides development teams with a robust and reliable hypervisor domain on which to run Android and Linux distributions. In addition, QNX Hypervisor 2.2 can be extended so that system architects can choose to run software in virtual machines or run software in conjunction with virtual machines in the host domain. This flexibility enables developers to reduce system complexity and add Android and Linux to the SoC without compromising functionality and performance. Notably, mission-critical applications can share host domain services (backends) with Android based on priority scheduling, allowing precise control over the behavior of guests. Therefore, as with all BlackBerry QNX Hypervisor product versions, system architects can not only fully control the separation and isolation of guests and devices through the QNX® Momentics tool suite, but also gain insight into the operation of the hypervisor.

“BlackBerry QNX has decades of experience delivering mission-critical embedded systems for a wide range of industries,” said Grant Courville, vice president of products and strategy at BlackBerry QNX. “With the release of QNX Hypervisor 2.2, we continue to stay in step with the evolution of silicon and shared device standards like VIRTIO. This way, embedded software architects and developers can continue to rely on our secure and reliable foundation for hypervisor software integration.”

BlackBerry QNX has a rich portfolio of embedded system software products. These products are specially designed for the implementation of critical tasks, including QNX Hypervisor, QNX Neutrino real-time operating system, as well as middleware and development tools. In addition, BlackBerry also provides safety-certified hypervisors (QNX® Hypervisor for Safety) and safety operating systems (QNX® OS for Safety). Thanks to BlackBerry's long-standing accumulation and strength in security, protection and continuous innovation, BlackBerry's QNX technology has been widely used in hundreds of millions of medical devices, industrial controls, automobiles, commercial trucks, railways and robotic systems around the world.