Playbook what is qnx

On App World , Lessard notes that BlackBerry's third-party app platform has taken in some 5, apps in the last couple months alone -- not a big number, necessarily, until you consider that they're only up to 17, total, so they're definitely seeing some nice growth percentages there.

Turning the attention to the perennial question of when QNX will come to smartphones, he basically echoes a sentiment first shared by bossman Lazaridis back at D: Dive Into Mobile : dual-core processors are key, so the new platform won't filter down until the hardware gets beefier.

He says that "we really want to make sure we don't back-step from that and offer a degraded experience because hardware is not ready or the performance isn't there," which is arguably odd wording considering that BlackBerry 6 is already well behind the curve -- how much worse could QNX on a single-core 1GHz-plus processor really be? All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company.

Some of our stories include affiliate links. Even drivers are excluded from the microkernel. QNX is, as a result, a very modular operating system. Additional features are added simply by bundling extra services, however for specific markets you don't incur any complexity or security penalty as unneeded services are simply turned off.

Obviously the requirements of a tablet are very different from a router, so RIM actually implemented an updated version of QNX 6. Another benefit of the modularity of QNX is that each service runs effectively sandboxed. A crash within a single service won't bring down the whole OS. Restarting a single crashed service can be done quickly. A small kernel should also be able to boot quicker, however the PlayBook itself has a longer boot time than Honeycomb because the entire OS image is validated using a crytographic hash on boot up.

As a result of this image validation, the PlayBook will always boot into a known secure environment. Should the image validation fail, the PlayBook will typically install a previous known-good copy of the kernel stored on a separate partition. This is of course one of the benefits of a microkernel OS: inter process communication is usually quite good, because it has to be.

In QNX every task or thread has a priority. Then you can play around with the filesystem including adding setuid binary to root it. Unfortunately no one has found a way to get Playbook firmware image. You can ssh to playbook using blackberry-connect and an ssh client.