QNX
More info
- Creator
- Gordon Bell, Dan Dodge
- Released
- 1982
- Owner
- BlackBerry (since 2010)
- Type
- Real-time operating system
- Website
- blackberry.qnx.com
Commercial microkernel real-time operating system, now pervasive in car infotainment and safety systems.
Created in 1982 by Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge in Canada, first under the name Quantum Software Systems. QNX was built around a microkernel: drivers, filesystems and the network stack run as ordinary processes outside the kernel, so a crashed driver does not bring the system down.
That made QNX popular wherever uptime is mandatory — medical devices, nuclear plants, routers and above all vehicles, where a large share of the world's car infotainment and driver assistance runs QNX. BlackBerry bought the company in 2010 and built BlackBerry 10 on it. POSIX-compliant and deterministic.