INTEGRITY RTOS Support in Qt 5.9 LTS

I am pleased to confirm that Qt 5.9 LTS officially supports the INTEGRITY Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) from Green Hills Software. INTEGRITY was initially supported with Qt 4.8 and will again be supported from Qt 5.9 onwards. The interest in running Qt on INTEGRITY has been customer driven, primarily from Automotive for use in safety certified Instrument Clusters, but also from other industry sectors.

One might ask why is it important to support INTEGRITY for Qt? Why is the leading cross-platform application and UI framework needed in RTOS applications? Aren't these the ones so deeply buried into our infrastructure, that you almost never notice when you come across one? Well, yes and no. It is true that most of the RTOS applications are still done without any UI, let alone a fancy and interactive graphical user interface. But the number of those RTOS applications that require an advanced GUI framework to meet the user expectation is growing fast, along with the demand to run Qt on an RTOS that provides high degree of safety and security. Other embedded operating systems, such as embedded Linux, are not sufficient when it comes to their real-time capability, reliability, security and certified operations essential for certain industries such as automotive, medical, aerospace and industrial automation.

Qt 5.9 LTS for INTEGRITY is covered by our excellent technical support for all existing Qt for INTEGRITY license holders. All the most important modules are available, for example: Qt Core, Qt Network, Qt GUI, Qt Quick, Qt Qml, Qt Quick Controls 2 and Qt 3D. Initially we are supporting NXP i.MX6 and NVIDIA Tegra X1 hardware. Other hardware, such as Intel Apollo Lake can also be used, and we intend to continue adding support for new hardware with subsequent Qt releases. The following video shows Qt 5.9 LTS based digital instrument cluster running on top of INTEGRITY RTOS with NXP i.MX6 and NVIDIA Tegra X1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF7JV3nkcR0

Leveraging the Qt framework with INTEGRITY RTOS enables an easy way of adding state-of-the-art graphical user interfaces to security and safety critical systems. It is easier to certify the product to comply with the requirements of for example the automotive or medical industries when the solution is built on top of an RTOS that is already certified for that industry domain. We see many industries, for example medical, automotive, industrial automation, aerospace and defense, directly benefiting from now being able to leverage Qt for INTEGRITY. The in-built capabilities of the INTEGRITY RTOS platform allow the Qt framework to run in such a way that it does not interfere with the real-time operation of the system. This simplifies creation of safety critical systems and enables certifying the Qt based system to standards for functional safety such as IEC 61508, ISO 26262 and IEC 62304.

Green Hills INTEGRITY is not only a certified RTOS, but also provides a real-time hypervisor, INTEGRITY Multivisor, allowing guest OSes such as Linux to run on the same SoC as the safety critical RTOS. This simplifies building complex systems such as digital cockpits. The following video shows Qt Automotive Suite running on top of Linux as well as a Qt-based instrument cluster running on the INTEGRITY RTOS – both on the same Intel Apollo Lake SoC leveraging INTEGRITY secure virtualisation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsxxeHCUSE

If you have not yet considered leveraging Qt for your next safety-critical project, I recommend taking a deeper look. Our sales, consultants and support are available to guide you through the evaluation process. If you have any questions, we are very happy to discuss more on how Qt meets the needs of your next product – please contact us.