QNX, a division of BlackBerry Limited, has announced its new QNX Containers technology, ahead of its launch in Q4 2024. The launch expands the company’s software portfolio to support OS virtualization and containerization on QNX-based devices.
QNX Containers provide a standards-based environment for the deployment, execution, and management of container technology on QNX-based devices, enabling customers to benefit from the pairing of container technology with the safety, security, and reliability of the QNX microkernel architecture. QNX Containers also allow for restrictions on features such as networking, filesystems, device access, memory access, communications and CPU among others. This restriction set provides secure and isolated embedded containers while maintaining the high performance and hard real-time nature of the QNX OS 8. The containers likewise co-exist alongside the QNX Hypervisor environment, allowing virtual machines and containers to be used simultaneously.
“Development teams looking to build containerization into their strategy shouldn’t have to compromise on their choice of RTOS. QNX containers provide a standards-based way to package applications and their dependencies and then run them in a controlled and managed environment on QNX. We are already working with many customers who have standardized on our hypervisor and OS, and who are gearing up to leverage QNX containers as well,” said Grant Courville, VP Products and Strategy, QNX.
In addition to Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliance and support for Kubernetes toolchains and Docker repositories, QNX Containers is also built according to ISO 21434 security processes. Here, it has been designed to support functional safety certification as part of QNX’s safety roadmap.
Courville continues, “Our work with Stellantis on its virtual cockpit using QNX Hypervisor, VirtIO and other QNX software in the cloud, is just one example of QNX technology enabling the forerunners in innovation. Ultimately, our focus is set on enabling our valued customers to build the most safe, secure and reliable systems on the planet, and to do so at scale from cloud to device, and from low-end to high performance compute platforms.”
