29 May 2009

QNX Delivers Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 With ARM Cortex Support

NX Software Systems has confirmed the general availability of the QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1, with support for the ARM Cortex-A8 procesor

For systems that require a sophisticated HMI, the QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 offers a standards-based composition manager. Using the composition manager, developers can seamlessly layer multiple HMI technologies, including Adobe Flash Lite, Web browser and 3D graphics on the same physical display. Together with QNX secure partitioning, the composition manager can ensure clean separation between graphics applications, allowing systems to download new applications without affecting the performance of existing programs. The composition manager is based on Khronos Group’s OpenKODE, an open standard that increases the code portability of graphics applications, the company said.

On the performance front, the QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 introduces support for the ARM Cortex-A8 processor. Version 6.4.1 also adds floating-point unit (FPU) support for the signal processing engine in Freescale PowerPC e500 processor cores, which form the basis of high-performance PowerQUICC III communications processors. The QNX Neutrino RTOS already provides symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and bound multiprocessing (BMP) for multi-core processors based on the e500 core.

To further simplify development of embedded HMIs, the QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 introduces a modular, multi-platform, embeddable Web browser. The browser is based on the open source Webkit engine, which also forms the basis of the Mac OS X and iPhone Safari Web browsers. The composition manager and Web browser complement the existing portfolio of QNX HMI technologies, which include an HMI player based on Adobe Flash Lite 3, support for the OpenGL ES 3D API, and an extensible, fault-tolerant graphics framework.

The QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 also introduces read-only support for the Microsoft Windows NTFS file system and for the Apple Mac OS X journaled file system known as HFS+. This extends the operating system’s already comprehensive support for industry-standard file systems, including FAT32, CIFS, NFS, ext2, and others.