Leading Safety & High-Performance Virtualization Technology
The QNX Hypervisor offers virtualization technology designed for complex embedded systems, enabling separation and isolation of guest operating systems on a single SoC. The solution is built using the unique QNX OS microkernel architecture and comes with the field-proven QNX tool chain and C and math libraries.
Consolidating applications onto one SoC with QNX Hypervisor technology allows you to:
- Reduce hardware costs, such as boards and wiring
- Optimize size, weight and power consumption
- Shorten development and test cycles
- Easily migrate unmodified legacy environments and code to multi-core CPUs
Reduce safety certification time and costs with hypervisor technology that has the highest levels of safety compliance and pre-certification. Leveraging standards such as POSIX and VirtIO, the QNX Hypervisor offers separation and isolation of safety-critical components from non-safety-critical components.
- Pre-certified to ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3
- Compliance with IEC 62304
- Update system parts independently to avoid impacting certifications and pre-certifications
Blend virtual and host environments as required by your system using the QNX Hypervisor. The host environment is the service domain that supports the virtual machines.
- Separate isolated guest operating systems
- Develop full-featured hypervisor environments that share graphics, audio, touchscreens, etc. between guests and the host
- Support the safe co-existence and control of unmodified Android, Linux, QNX and other OS
By following a priority-based virtual CPU (vCPU) sharing model with adaptive partitioning to maximize compute throughput, the QNX Hypervisor provides a high-performance virtualization environment.
- Build dependable systems without wasting resources
- Ensure your higher priority guest OS will preempt a lower priority guest OS when sharing a CPU
- Meet the precision requirement of an embedded zero-downtime production system

QNX Hypervisor Support
The QNX Hypervisor makes full use of hardware virtualization capabilities to perform memory, CPU core, PCI configuration, and interrupt isolation between virtual machines. Assign hardware devices to specific virtual machines, thus hiding those devices from all other virtual machines. VirtIO-based block, console, and network as well as other para-virtualized drivers for device sharing are also supported.
Applications running in multiple virtual machines must work cooperatively in order to deliver the service of the embedded device. The QNX Hypervisor supports shared memory access, shared file access, and high-speed TCP/IP/UDP networking between virtual machines to allow applications running in multiple virtual machines to communicate efficiently.
The QNX Hypervisor supports the QNX Neutrino® OS, Linux, and Android operating systems, as well as other unmodified operating systems, RTOS, and real-time executives. Contact your Blackberry QNX Sales Representative for the latest list of supported OS.
Comprehensive Tools and Frameworks
Quickly Build and Optimize Applications
The QNX Hypervisor is integrated with the QNX Momentics® Tool Suite, a comprehensive, Eclipse-based integrated development environment with innovative profiling tools for maximum insight into system behavior. Using QNX Momentics developers can see and capture system-wide events across all supported guest OS as well as view and trace virtualization-specific events within the hypervisor itself. Individual virtual machines can be paused, analyzed, debugged and resumed. The QNX Developer’s Guides allow the integrator to extend the virtual environment by building customized virtual devices.
Extend Support for the Sharing of System Peripherals
With the QNX Advanced Virtualization Framework, extend support for the sharing of graphics controllers, display controllers, audio interfaces, video streaming services, cameras, input devices, and other system peripherals, such as, USB. The advanced virtualization frameworks are highly optimized, integrated, and hardware-independent. As Android hardware abstraction layers (HALs) continue to evolve and change, the advanced virtualization framework and a safety-certified and secure hypervisor provide the necessary foundation to support different iterations of guest operating system software.
