About This Guide

The System Architecture guide accompanies the QNX Neutrino realtime OS and is intended for both application developers and end-users.

The guide describes the philosophy of QNX Neutrino and the architecture used to robustly implement the OS. It covers message-passing services, followed by the details of the microkernel, the process manager, resource managers, the Photon microGUI, and other aspects of QNX Neutrino.

Note that certain features of the OS as described in this guide may still be under development for a given release.

For the latest news and information on any QNX product, visit our website (www.qnx.com). You'll find links to many useful areas -- software downloads, a searchable knowledge base, featured articles by developers, newsgroups, technical support options, and more.

The following table may help you find information quickly:

To find out about:	Go to:
OS design goals; message-passing IPC	The Philosophy of QNX Neutrino
System services	The QNX Neutrino Microkernel
System event monitoring	The Instrumented Microkernel
Hardware affinity, inter-processor interrupts, etc.	SMP
Memory management, pathname management, etc.	Process Manager
Shared objects	Dynamic Linking
Device drivers	Resource Managers
Image, RAM, QNX 4, DOS, CD-ROM, Flash, NFS, CIFS, Ext2 filesystems	Filesystems
Serial and parallel devices	Character I/O
Graphical environment	The Photon microGUI
Network subsystem	Networking Architecture
Native QNX Neutrino networking	Native Networking (Qnet)
TCP/IP implementation	TCP/IP Networking
Fault recovery	High Availability Manager
Power-aware systems	Power Management
Terms used in QNX docs	Glossary

Note to Windows users

In QNX documentation, we use a forward slash (/) as a delimiter in all pathnames, including those pointing to Windows files.

We also generally follow POSIX/UNIX filesystem conventions.