Howdy! I've been with BlackBerry/QNX for over 17 years in various roles and I now manage Developer Relations for QNX. You can find me here, on Reddit, at our open-source repository at gitlab.com/qnx, and on our developer blog at devblog.qnx.com. Any opinions I express are my own and not those of QNX.
QNX is not a GPOS, so you wouldn't. I mean you _could_, but the real benefit here is hidden within: with the toolchain now included in this image, folks working on QNX projects can now build them right on target. No more messy cross-compilation.
In some cases it could also be an Android guest running as a VM on the QNX Hypervisor, where there are multiple guests (QNX, Android, Linux) making use of the same HW.
There's been talk about this on Reddit too, where our chief architect of QNX 8 broke down the decision. He mentioned it was ultimately a tough decision, but that in the end the cons outweighed the pros.
We still do that! In fact, the _QNX From The Board Up_ series on the developer blog is a small rip from that training content, adapted by Mr Brown. I hope we'll get all of it out there for everyone to benefit from in 2026 :)
Hiya! The bulk of my colleagues and I are in Ottawa and Waterloo Ontario Canada. We're a division of BlackBerry Limited, and have been for about 15 years. QNX itself is about 45+ years old, having come out of an OS course at the University of Waterloo. I work with a lot of people who are celebrating 25-35 year anniversaries -- very much still a lot of the same engineering and product talent here through all of the transitions.
We're in 270+ million vehicles on the road today, 1 in 7 globally (and growing!) It's awesome going to shows and reminding people that every time they turn their key (okay, okay: _push the ON button_), there's a good chance they are booting up QNX under the hood!
Some of my colleagues and I visited the class with the UW CSC in the Spring.. They said something like half of the students drop out in the first week after learning how much work that class is going to be!
It's funny.. We've spent a lot of time at universities this year, and that's the same reaction we sometimes get there when we say we're over 45 years old and have nearly 1000 staff members. "Yo, bro, I thought you were like a little startup bro!"
From someone who worked on PlayBook: THANK YOU! It was a tight little machine with a great browser and awesome audio for the time. And it slid right into my back jeans pocket. Those were good times!
Today though, I'd argue that with full DSMP support and much more capable systems, any overhead from message passing is much less of a concern, or at least outweighed by other benefits.
Have you noticed the base level knowledge change? I talked with a second year CS student a while back who didn't know how to ping another host, and it really made me wonder if new students are choosing CS because it seems cool (versus _back in my day_ when we were all geeks who took CS because we lived and breathed it all day in life anyway).
You should be able to use the free QNXE Everywhere license to spin up a QEMU VM with a few clicks in the IDE. I appreciate it would be easier of it was a single-click download like the Windows image though. I'll take that feedback.
If I can help enable your QNX support in any other way, feel free to DM or message: qnxcommunityengagement at qnx dot com.