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QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety
The QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety products allow you to run multiple OSs on a target system so you can separate critical and non-critical functions, support a wide variety of applications, and reduce hardware costs.
User's Guide
This User's Guide explains the QNX hypervisor architecture and provides instructions for installing and running a QNX hypervisor system, changing system components and configuration, and using hypervisor features such as virtual devices (vdevs).
Monitoring and Troubleshooting
This chapter describes some tools and techniques you can use to monitor and troubleshoot your hypervisor system.
Troubleshooting strategies
There are numerous ways to get information about the different parts of your hypervisor system.

QNX Momentics IDE User's Guide
This User's Guide describes version 8.0 of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that's part of the QNX Tool Suite.
QNX Software Development Platform
QNX SDP is a cross-compiling and debugging environment, including an IDE and command-line tools, for building binary images and programs for target boards running the QNX OS 8.0.
QNX Software in the Cloud
QNX Software in the Cloud enables developers to use the QNX software in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure).
QNX Toolkit for Visual Studio Code
This User's Guide describes the QNX^® Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. The guide introduces you to the QNX Toolkit by explaining the QNX development environment and how to build, run, and debug your QNX^® Operating System (OS) applications and systems.
QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety
The QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety products allow you to run multiple OSs on a target system so you can separate critical and non-critical functions, support a wide variety of applications, and reduce hardware costs.
- User's Guide
  This User's Guide explains the QNX hypervisor architecture and provides instructions for installing and running a QNX hypervisor system, changing system components and configuration, and using hypervisor features such as virtual devices (vdevs).
  - Understanding QNX Virtual Environments
    QNX hypervisors are designed to meet the expectations of a hypervisor specified by the Popek/Goldberg Theorem.
  - QNX Hypervisor: Protection Features
    This chapter explains the main features used by the QNX hypervisor to protect itself and its guests. Many of these features are part of the design, while others are configurable.
  - Configuration
    A QNX hypervisor, its qvm processes that create the VMs in which guests run, and these guests must be configured to work together.
  - Building a QNX Hypervisor System
    This chapter explains how to build (assemble) a QNX hypervisor system and transfer a bootable image to a supported target platform.
  - Booting and Shutting Down
    This chapter describes how to boot and shut down the hypervisor host and guests in a QNX hypervisor system.
  - Using Virtual Devices, Networking, and Memory Sharing
    This chapter describes how guests can discover and connect to vdevs and how they can use important hypervisor capabilities, such as networking and memory sharing.
  - Monitoring and Troubleshooting
    This chapter describes some tools and techniques you can use to monitor and troubleshoot your hypervisor system.
    - Troubleshooting strategies
      There are numerous ways to get information about the different parts of your hypervisor system.
    - Viewing hypervisor activity
      After the hypervisor guest has booted, you can use QNX Momentics IDE to open a command terminal to either the host or a guest and then view its resource usage and activity.
    - Getting hypervisor trace information
      You can use the tracelogger utility and the QNX Momentics IDE System Profiler to capture and examine trace events from a VM.
    - Gathering information about a virtual machine
      The QNX hypervisor provides ways for gathering information about the VM running inside of a qvm process.
    - OS-VM configuration mismatch
      A guest may fail to start or not perform as expected if the VM in which it is running is not configured with the vdevs the guest OS expects to find.
    - Getting a guest dump during a crash
      You can configure your guest and the watchdog vdev in its VM to dump the guest's state in the event of a crash.
    - qvm process exit codes
      When a qvm process exits, the shell exit status indicates the reason for the exit.
  - Performance Tuning
    This chapter describes common sources of overhead in a QNX hypervisor system, and strategies for reducing this overhead and optimizing system performance.
  - VM Configuration Reference
    When you specify options to configure a qvm process, you are assembling and configuring the components of a virtual machine (VM) in which a guest will run.
  - Virtual Device Reference
    This chapter presents the virtual devices (vdevs) delivered with QNX hypervisors, and describes how to configure these vdevs.
  - Virtual Machine Firmware
    The virtual machines (VMs) in a QNX hypervisor system provide a comprehensive firmware interface for guest OSs to manage VM power settings, access timers, and more.
  - Utilities and Drivers Reference
    This chapter describes the utilities and drivers delivered with the QNX hypervisor.
  - Terminology
    The following terms are used throughout the QNX hypervisor documentation.
- Virtual Device Developer's Guide
  The Virtual Device Developer's Guide is intended for use by developers writing virtual devices (vdevs) in a QNX hypervisor system.
- Virtual Device Developer's API Reference
  The Virtual Device Developer's API Reference presents the QNX hypervisor public virtual device (vdev) API. It is intended for use by developers writing virtual devices (vdevs) in a QNX hypervisor system.
Typographical Conventions, Support, and Licensing
This section describes the typographical conventions used throughout the documentation, explains how to obtain technical support, and provides some information about licensing.

Troubleshooting strategies

There are numerous ways to get information about the different parts of your hypervisor system.

To troubleshoot guests, use the same debugging tools you would use for the OS and its applications in a non-virtualized system, by connecting to a TCP/IP stack running within the guest. For example, if you run a QNX guest and it starts such a stack along with the qconn service, the QNX Momentics IDE can connect to the guest through TCP/IP and do application-level debugging. For information about debugging with the IDE, see the Debugging Applications chapter in the IDE User's Guide.

For hosts, the troubleshooting ways include:

Add the logger option to the qvm configuration (see logger in the VM Configuration Reference chapter) to log certain message types.
Use tracelogging (see Getting hypervisor trace information) to examine trace events from a VM.
Run the QNX dumper utility to produce a core file for any host process, including a qvm process, that crashes.
CAUTION:
The dumper utility should be used only in development systems and not production systems. This utility can cause significant delays for a VM to enter its local DSS because dumper copies the entire guest-physical address space to the core file, which can take several seconds depending on the size of the guest memory.
Only use dumper with one of the -H, -m, or -S options, as these options restrict the amount of data that gets dumped. For more information, see the dumper entry in the QNX OS Utilities Reference.

A typical approach to troubleshooting would be to use the logger option to gather general information about what a qvm process is doing (and, by indirection, what a guest is doing), then to use tracelogging for more detailed analysis.

If you need to keep more than the hypervisor's default 4K of slog information, you can use the set option to set the slog-buffer variable to the right buffer size (see slog-buffer in the VM Configuration Reference chapter). You can also send the output to your console.

Page updated: March 14, 2026