What you’ll learn:
- What developers find important when choosing an OS.
- Why OS safety and security is important to developers.
BlackBerry QNX recently commissioned a survey targeted at developers and their consideration of operating system (OS) features such as safety and security. I talked with Winston Leung, Senior Manager at BlackBerry QNX, about the results.
As one might expect these days, security sits atop the list of considerations of why one might switch OSes (Fig. 1). Safety is also essential, although that focus tends to be more important for the usual applications areas like automotive, avionics, and medical.
These results match the list of OS features that all developers were looking for in general (Fig. 2). Security once again heads the list. I found it interesting that most indicated safety was more important than determinism, which is typically a requirement for many RTOS applications. Of course, this survey was for a wide audience of embedded software developers.
Open- and closed-source considerations were also part of the survey. Winston Leung noted, “While open-source operating systems are favored by nearly half (44%) of developers, primarily due to their widespread familiarity and open availability, these platforms are more likely to experience breaches (46% vs. 40% for proprietary systems), leading to project delays for 72% of those affected. This underscores the need for pre-certified, secure-by-design solutions that allow developers to focus on innovation rather than troubleshooting.”
The number of developers who needed to meet safety certifications indicated that the task could be very challenging given their current OS, which may not have been pre-certified (Fig. 3).
Of course, one of the reasons to do this survey is that the QNX RTOS is a pre-certified operating system. It’s well established in a range of applications areas, including automotive. BlackBerry’s QNX Hypervisor also fits that requirement, given that most high-performance, safety- and security-critical applications run on multicore application processors.
