As Research In Motion (RIM) gets ready to launch its next generation of smartphones, I suspect the architecture of its new operating system and developer APIs will come under scrutiny What many Corporate IT Security consultants will be looking at, will be its system attributes related to Security and Reliability. This will decide its adoption in the Enterprise. From first looks, it is designed with just that in mind.
In previous posts, I had looked at RIM's outlook from a fundamentals perspective as well as listed development options for application developers. In this post, lets look at the Operating System itself and what it may mean for future adoption.
It is this aspect, that allows the QNX Neutrino OS that is being proposed for the new platform to be used in health devices as well as managing Nuclear plants.
In previous posts, I had looked at RIM's outlook from a fundamentals perspective as well as listed development options for application developers. In this post, lets look at the Operating System itself and what it may mean for future adoption.
Security First
One of the main advantages that the new platform will have will be the underlying operating system (OS). Based on QNX, a over 30 year old company RIM bought a few years ago, the operating system is based on a micro-kernel architecture. It essentially means that the core OS is very small and it loads other capabilities (such as networking, filesystems, etc.) at startup time with lesser privileges than the base OS. This design makes the OS much more secure than even traditional Linux distributions that are based on mono-lithic kernels where the core OS has much more services running with the highest level privileges.It is this aspect, that allows the QNX Neutrino OS that is being proposed for the new platform to be used in health devices as well as managing Nuclear plants.
More Reliability as well
The same Micro-kernel architecture also makes the Operating System much more reliable. Since most core capabilities out side of the core OS is running as a daemon process (think Windows Services), they can be shut down and re-started without having to resort to a boot of the operating system. Android tries to achieve the same outcome at the application level (and not at the OS level), by running each application in a separate Java Virtual Machine process thus isolating their memory from other applications. However, QNX does this at a deeper and much more efficient level.
Also, if a component is buggy, a patch can be issued to replace that component alone without a full OS release.
An Industry Standard Interface for Applications
While the above justifies the selection of a micro-kernel based Operating System, the challenge now becomes ensuring compatibility with an application layer. For this, the QNX operating system is built to provide a POSIX standards based Interface. POSIX stands for Portable Operating System Interface and is a set of standards that allows applications compiled to this standard to work across operating systems. It is this standard that allows RIMM to offer multiple development options to application developers.
Summary
All these attributes suggest that Research in Motion has thought through their strategy for the next generation of smartphones and associated eco-system. End of the day, the customers will decide whether it all makes sense or is it RIM's last push to make a comeback.
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