OSNews conducted an interview with QNX Software System's Systems Analyst Vince Davis last week. There are discussions about the Harman International take over, QNX's competition with Linux and WinCE, the upcoming QNX Momentics release and more.In his interview Vince talked about the QNX eQip project and also the upcoming QNX 6.4, slated for second half of 2006. This upgrade will be a large step forward for the platform just as QNX 6.3 was from QNX 6.2. Among the advancements:
Integration of SMP support into one kernel. The SMP code is mature enough to sit in with the main kernel without a performance hit, so out of the box QNX will support up to four processors.
More of the GNU software library is being ported to QNX. With QNX 6.4, QNX will host all of the typical command-line tools a regular distribution of Linux would include.
Photon will support more modularization for ultra-embedded devices. There's some tweaks to how windows are rendered and buffers are retained, so there'll be less of a footprint than before.
Compiles using remote resources, more command-line tool support in the GUI, more board support packages, GCC 4.0 integration, and better support for older target versions.
Support for the latest Intel processors and chipsets, including the Pentium M and dual-core processors. QNX 6.4 should also be running on Apple's first wave of Intel Macintosh systems as well.