Dissecting QNX [pdf]

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-18/asia-18-Wetzels_Abassi_dissecting_qnx__WP.pdf

by adamnemecek • 8 years ago

120 71 8 years ago

blackhat.com

ahati7• 8 years ago

Very insightful. QNX 7 disable aslr maybe because of ASIL support.

cpeterso• 8 years ago

What is ASIL? Automotive Safety Integrity Level? How does ASIL relate to ASLR?

ahati7• 8 years ago

Yes, with ASLR, qnx loses the predictability. BTW, qnx7 is ASIL-D on SEooC.

saagarjha3• 8 years ago

Are you talking about Automotive Safety Integrity Level? If so, how does this have anything to do with ASLR?

kristoffer• 8 years ago

I don't know why they disabled ASLR, but safety critical systems (and functional safety people) tend avoid randomization...

ahati7• 8 years ago

Anyone working on QNX based system here?

jayalpha• 8 years ago

I found this impressive https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/qnx-7-desktop/

mmorriso• 8 years ago

Yes, I maintain a few legacy system that still operate partially on QNX 4.25

It did a few really cool things for its time, considering that TCP/IP networking was an optional add-on when we originally deployed.

lsiebert• 8 years ago

I don't myself, but my brother, who designs and builds stages for U2 and other musicians, uses it for automation (lights etc.)

ahati7• 8 years ago

Does he use the AMX systems. That is Harman, Harman used to own qnx before.

Kenji2• 8 years ago

Yes. I work with QNX6.6 daily. I also worked with QNX6.5 and QNX7.0. It's a real blast to work with the mikrokernel. It's a really cool system, and the kernel stability is excellent. Feels good that when a low level driver crashes, your system just goes on as if nothing happened (except, of course, the applications that need this driver). Speaking of drivers, the driver situation on QNX is a bit sad, simply because there are few drivers and the ones that exist aren't as high quality and well tested because QNX is niche. Still, if there was a QNX environment that is as progressive as Linux Ubuntu (concerning GUI, drivers, etc.) and OpenSource, I'd definitely use QNX as my main OS.

na85• 8 years ago

QNX is niche

What is the most mainstream or perhaps "least niche" of the real time embedded OSes?

nickpsecurity• 8 years ago

Check this out:

https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/qnx-7-desktop/

ahati7• 8 years ago

Can not agree more. Once you know qnx, nothing matches up anymore. Linux feels like dinosaur.

Cyph0n3• 8 years ago

Cisco's high-end router operating system, IOS-XR, has two flavors: an older one built on top of a QNX kernel and the current one built on top of Linux. The QNX version is still supported but is not in active development.

wolfgke9• 8 years ago

Do you know any details on the reason why Cisco switched from QNX to Linux?

exDM692• 8 years ago

Yes. Working for a HW vendor catering to automotive and embedded customers. QNX is one of the five or so OSes we work with.

insulanian2• 8 years ago

What are the other ones?

bregma3• 8 years ago

Yes. I work for QNX. I can answer any technical questions.

vmsp• 8 years ago

What's your goto intro/reference to QNX's internals?

ahati7• 8 years ago

How much is the difference of qnx7 and 6.4 at kernel source level? 6.4 source is available in github from time qnx was made open source.

TheSoftwareGuy• 8 years ago

Yup, my companies product is actually mentioned on the first page of the link

cornellwright• 8 years ago

I've used it on medical devices.

insulanian2• 8 years ago

I still have the QNX demo disk image (including GUI!) which fits on a floppy drive.

It's a shame there's no comparable open source OS :(

wolfgke9• 8 years ago

For those who want to play around with it:

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo

Fnoord2• 8 years ago

A word of caution: the first URL doesn't have TLS (HTTPS). None of the links to the demos have either. The links on Win World PC don't have any checksums.

I actually remember using this demo floppy though, back in those days (the other impressive Unix-like OS I used back then was BeOS). It was the first time I stumbled upon Towers of Hanoi. Sadly the main developer of QNX passed away.

agumonkey• 8 years ago

graphical os smaller than your average favicon

Koshkin• 8 years ago

I think the 32-bit MenuetOS still fits on a floppy (and is open source).

sidkshatriya2• 8 years ago

Opening the link in Google Chrome 68 shows the PDF front page momentarily and then the browser shows a blank screen.

Is anybody else encountering this problem?

sidkshatriya2• 8 years ago

Interestingly when I relaunched Chrome and it auto-updated to Chrome 69 I am able to see the PDF without a problem. Not sure where the issue lies now.

als0• 8 years ago

I have this problem too with Chrome on macOS. Refreshing the page makes it appear, but this happens frequently enough to be annoying.

namdnay• 8 years ago

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=870404

Fnoord2• 8 years ago

Related 34C3 talk [1]. Not sure if there's any news in this PDF. Skimming through the CVEs mentions 2017 but none from 2018 (34C4 was in December 2017).

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8730-taking_a_scalpel_to_qnx

dfox3• 8 years ago

The article seems to be a more academic rephrasing of said talk.

Dissecting QNX [pdf]

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