Glossary

Launch Manager

Component to start and stop processes on a POSIX like operating system.

Health Monitor

Provides process local monitoring functionalities such as deadline monitoring and logical program flow monitoring.

Control Interface

Interface to control the lifecycle of the system, e.g. to start and stop processes.

Alive Interface

Interface to monitor the aliveness of a process.

Sandbox

A sandbox is a set of configurations, which are applied to a process when it is started. It can include environment variables, secpol policies, cgroup configurations, user and group IDs etc.

Health Monitor Interface

Interface to monitor the health of a process, e.g. to check if a process is alive or if it is running as expected.

Alive Monitoring

Checks if an application reports an alive state in a certain period.

Deadline Monitoring

Monitor to detect if a state was reached within a specified time related to another event.

Logical Programflow Monitoring

Monitor to detect if certain states were reached in a defined sequence and time interval.

Run State

An Run State defines a set of components, which are in status running and are supervised by the software platform. If the health management system detects abnormal situation it can change the Run State.

Component

A configurable unit in the Launch Manager that describes an executable and its runtime environment (sandbox). Components can be grouped together in Run Targets to define system operational states.

Lifecycle Component

Node of the dependency tree.

Process

Instantiation of an Executable programs running on the system that are managed by the Launch Manager.

UID

User Identifier - a unique number assigned to each user on a Unix-like operating system.

GID

Group Identifier - a unique number assigned to each group on a Unix-like operating system.

Polling Interval

The time interval between successive checks of a condition or status.

Working Directory

The current directory from which a process is executed, also known as CWD (Current Working Directory).

File Descriptor

A handle used by a process to access files or other input/output resources.

Procmgr

Process Manager - a QNX system component that manages process creation and execution.

ASLR

Address Space Layout Randomization - a security technique that randomizes the memory layout of processes.

Recovery Action

Actions taken by the Launch Manager when a process fails or terminates abnormally.

Ready Condition

A configurable condition that must be satisfied before a component is considered ready and operational. Ready conditions can include file system checks, network availability, or custom application-specific signals.

Ready conditions can either be reported by the component itself through the Lifecycle Interface or determined via external state monitoring. External state examples include: process started, file is available, socket was opened, or that the process finished successfully.

Liveliness

The state indicating that a process is active and responding as expected.

Watchdog

A monitoring mechanism that detects system failures and can trigger recovery actions.

Interval

A period of time between events or measurements.

QNX

A real-time operating system commonly used in embedded systems.

DSS

Device Safe State - a safe operational state that a system can enter during failures.

DAG

Directed Acyclic Graph - a data structure used to represent dependencies between processes.

SWC

Software Components - modular software units that can be independently managed.

Run target

A named collection of processes and their dependencies that can be launched, stopped, or switched as a group to achieve a specific operational mode or configuration.

Operating System

The system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs.