About This Document

The Building Embedded Systems guide is intended for developers who are developing or building BSPs for QNX Neutrino RTOS embedded systems.

About this guide

This guide provides information about how to build and customize:
  • QNX Board Support Packages (BSPs)
  • QNX Neutrino RTOS embedded systems
  • the startup of QNX Neutrino embedded systems

It is organized thematically rather than sequentially; that is, you should refer to the chapters relevant to the task you are doing, rather than work through the book from start to finish. For instance, if you need to learn how to customize the QNX Initial Program Loader (IPL), you should first read the “Overview” chapter, then the “Initial Program Loaders (IPLs)” chapter.

Because you will likely be working with a QNX BSP, the BSP chapters are near the front of the guide, right after the “Overview” chapter. You should also refer to the BSP User's Guide for your target platform. This guide is available from the QNX SDP 7.0 Board Support Documentation page.

Note: We assume that you've already installed QNX Neutrino and that you're familiar with its architecture. For an overview, see the QNX Neutrino System Architecture guide.

Contents of this guide

This guide is organized around these main topics:
Topic Chapter(s)
BSPs and how to use them Overview and Working with QNX BSPs
IPLs Initial Program Loaders (IPLs) and IPL Library
Startup programs
Making images, including flash filesystem images OS Images
The mkifs buildfile, and how to configure your startup program OS Image Buildfiles and the Sample Buildfiles appendix
Hardware and software debugging support for QNX embedded systems Debugging a QNX Embedded System
Terms used in QNX docs Glossary

More information

Additional useful information about building embedded systems may be found in other QNX documentation:
To find out about: See:
The QNX Momentics Integrated Development Environment (IDE) QNX Momentics IDE User's Guide
How to use the QNX Momentics IDE to generate images for embedded targets “Building a QNX project” in the QNX Momentics IDE User's Guide
BSPs for a specific board or platform The BSP User's Guide for the board or platform, available from the QNX SDP 7.0 Board Support Documentation page
A discussion of basic BSP customization tasks and options Customizing a BSP
Write your own drivers Writing a Resource Manager
Building a system for a specific product The documentation for that product