QNX crashes soon after starting to boot up => VT-x/AMD-V required

[cromo]

I wanted to try the QNX Neutrino 6.3.2 today and found out that it crashes soon after booting up from the iso image. qemu, on the other hand, works just fine and so does VirtualBox if I run the machine from the command line (VBoxSDL -vm QNX -norawr0 -norawr3). However, another problem comes up when the gues OS is entering the GUI mode - the screen under VBox becomes permanently black, although the machine seems to not hang as the mouse cursos is still viable. qemu, again, works fine. Last but no least, I get the "segmentation fault" (or "memory protection violation", depending on translation) message after closing the VM with Host-Q combination. Anyway, I don't think it is related to this particular guest OS.

For those who are interested in testing QNX Neutrino, the QNX Momentics developement suite (incl. Neutrino 6.3.2, IDEs, etc.) can be downloaded freely from here: ​http://www.qnx.com/products/getmomentics/ . Please note, that the free license is valid only for non-commercial use of the product.

My testing environment: Linux 2.6.22 VirtualBox 1.5.0 Binary

[skibrianski]

I get this problem when I don't have VT-x enabled. Host is amd64 ubuntu, trying to boot the ISO for QNX neutrino 6.3.2: root@ganiodayo:~/.VirtualBox/VDI# dpkg -l | grep virtualbox | awk '{ print $1 " " $2 " " $3 }' ii virtualbox-ose 1.5.6-dfsg-6ubuntu1 ii virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic 24.0.4 ii virtualbox-ose-modules-generic 24.0.4

When I enable VT-x (intel machine here), the problem goes away, however). The attached screenshots will hopefully be helpful.

[skibrianski]

I was able to complete an install, but unfortunately, none of the networking cards that vbox emulates seem to be compatible with QNX :-(

I base that on having trying QNX with 3 adapter types: Am79C970A, Am79C973, and 82540EM (all set up with NAT) -- none are detected by QNX (verified by checking ifconfig en0)

[stefanos]

The problem still occur with QNX Software Development Platform 6.4.1 and VirtualBox 3.0.10

Please have a look at the ​Running Momentics using the VirtualBox Virtual Machine thread from the foundry27 QNX community portal:

It's a bug in VirtualBox - they don't support the use of Ring 1 by guests. I spoke to them and >they will look at a workaround eventually (obviously it's not a high priority for them). For >now, you can use VT-x mode which works properly.

[ash37]

Actually it works, just a bit strange way. If you launch VBoxSDL instead of VirtualBox, and apply --norawr0 command line parameter, it works great for me. Command line is: VBoxSDL --startvm<your VM name> --norawr0 Just in Windows you need one more trick (this time for SDL): set SDL_VIDEDRIVER=windib. I believe that VboxSDL and VirtualBox share kernel code, so there should be a way to setup VirtualBox in appropriate way do not use r0 (maybe it is VM XML descriptor?). It would be nice if VirtualBox developers share this "top secret" with us).

[Sander van Leeuwen]

QNX guests require VT-x or AMD-V. The -norawr0 option isn't really useful as it has a serious impact on performance.

[ash37]

I didn't run benchmark tests, but visually performance looked very good. The main problem of this your solution is that there is quite enough processors without virtualization support: Intel Core Duo (up to T6600), most of Intel Celeron, most of Intel Pentium, a lot of AMDs. So recommended restriction looks as too discriminating.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

Sorry, but our position is not likely to change.