Apex.OS 26-08: Building the Foundation for Series Production
Automotive software is moving from demonstrations and pilot programs into series production. At that stage, performance and feature breadth are only part of the equation. OEMs and suppliers need a software product designed for mixed-criticality environments, asserted via verifiable safety evidence, governed by controlled quality processes, validated across its intended use cases, and ready to integrate into a long-lived vehicle program.
Apex.OS 26-08 is focused on that transition.
This release strengthens Apex.OS as a product for production automotive systems: a certification-ready foundation for safety-related applications, a runtime that fits established OEM workflows, and a platform that can be deployed repeatedly across vehicles, variants, and hardware configurations.
The release brings together improvements across product certification, diagnostics, security, platform support, data logging, and deployment performance. More than a collection of individual features, these changes reflect what it takes to move from building software for a vehicle to delivering software as part of a series-production vehicle program.
Product certification as a foundation for production
Series production begins with confidence in the product itself. That confidence comes from more than a successful test run. It comes from a disciplined product lifecycle, traceable engineering processes, safety mechanisms that are understood and validated, and documentation that allows customers to build their own safety argument around the platform.
With Apex.OS 26-08, Apex.OS now fully complies with industry-standard quality management processes applied to our product. This gives customers a consistent foundation for their own development, integration, and audit activities, while making quality management a visible part of the product lifecycle rather than a separate project activity. The latest Apex.OS release also completes the core product-certification package needed for the next stage of automotive deployment. The safety manual, safety mechanisms, and full validation activities are complete, providing the evidence and documentation needed to support the next phase of independent product assessment.
Product certification is founded on an independent assessment, which is an essential step toward series-production readiness. It provides OEMs and suppliers with a clear basis for integrating Apex.OS into their own safety processes and vehicle-level safety cases, reinforcing confidence in the product's safety lifecycle and supporting evidence. While certification does not replace system-level responsibility, it establishes a trustworthy, repeatable starting point: a software foundation whose behavior, development process, and safety-related characteristics are documented and evaluated for use in safety-critical automotive systems.
Designed for the realities of OEM programs
Series-production vehicles depend on software that can be diagnosed, controlled, updated, and maintained over many years. That makes communication with the rest of the vehicle just as important as the application logic running on top of the platform. Apex.OS 26-08 adds support for additional Unified Diagnostic Services (UDS), including `0x28 CommunicationControl`, `0x11 ECU Reset`, and `0x34 RequestDownload`
The UDS stack also includes many other improvements aimed at production use in an automotive OEM environment. These capabilities support the operational lifecycle of an ECU—from controlled startup and fault handling to communication management and software download workflows. The objective is not simply to implement more diagnostic services. It is to make the diagnostics layer robust enough to participate in the established processes of an OEM: integration testing, vehicle bring-up, service, maintenance, and production support.
Security boundaries for production IPC
Production systems also need clear boundaries between the processes that make up the vehicle software stack. Apex.Ida now supports group-level access control for IPC communication: only processes owned by users within the same group can communicate with one another. This is a basic Apex.Ida security capability, but it addresses a practical production requirement. It allows system integrators to define which processes may exchange data and to establish a meaningful ownership boundary inside the platform. The release also adds a new example showing how to configure IPC access control, making the capability easier to evaluate and adopt.
Security is most useful when it is part of the normal development workflow. By combining the feature with documentation and an example, Apex.OS makes it easier for teams to carry the same security model from development into deployment.
Supporting the hardware behind the vehicle—and beyond it
Series-production programs rarely use one generic compute platform. They involve target-specific hardware, operating-system configurations, and deployment constraints that must remain stable over the life of the product.
Apex.OS 26-08 adds support for the Renesas R-Car V4M with QNX OS for Safety 2.2 on the `aarch64` architecture, supporting automotive ADAS applications. This expands the set of production-oriented compute platforms available to automotive teams and supports the heterogeneous architectures common in modern vehicle programs.
The release also adds support for the Bosch Rexroth ORC2 ECU with QNX 7.1 on `aarch64` for agriculture applications. While the primary focus of this release is automotive series production, this platform is a reminder that the same foundation is being applied across safety-critical mobility and machinery programs.
The Apex.Ida connector layer continues to mature alongside the platform. Fixes across the CAN, SOME/IP, ISOBUS, MQTT, and DDS-RTPS connectors improve reliability at the boundaries where Apex.OS meets vehicle networks, machine networks, and existing software ecosystems. For OEM programs, fewer integration surprises at these boundaries mean less custom engineering and more predictable validation.
Evidence and repeatability through recording
Production development depends on being able to reproduce what happened in a vehicle. Recording and replay are essential for debugging, regression testing, validation, and the investigation of field issues.
Apex.Grace includes several improvements to recording based on `rosbag2`, strengthening the workflow from live system behavior to repeatable engineering evidence. The release also adds support for an AVI storage backend for recording images with `rosbag2`, giving teams a practical storage option for image-heavy automotive workloads. `rosbag2` has proven to be a performant recording solution for high throughput scenarios for a variety of different data sources as well as a reliable source for Software-in-the-Loop testing.
The Extensible Shared Memory Group for IPC makes early integration more flexible by allowing shared memory to grow dynamically. Developers no longer need to manually pre-configure and tune every shared-memory region before they know the final message sizes and workload profile. That simplifies initial deployment while preserving a path toward the more optimized configuration required for a production system.
These improvements support a central production principle: teams should be able to reproduce system behavior and evolve the configuration without introducing avoidable integration friction.
Performance from power-on to operation
Series-production requirements apply from the moment a vehicle powers on. Startup behavior affects user experience, system coordination, recovery strategies, and the timing assumptions of every component that follows.
Apex.OS 26-08 includes major improvements to boot-time performance for QNX deployments. Faster startup gives integrators more headroom when coordinating multiple components during initialization and helps the complete system transition from power-on to operational state more predictably.
The release is also robust against the Y2K38 problem, helping ensure that systems remain dependable as timestamps move beyond the signed 32-bit Unix time limit. Long-lived automotive products need this kind of forward-looking resilience because the software may remain in service long after the original development environment has changed.
Examples that shorten the path to adoption
Production software has to be usable by more than the team that created it. Clear examples help OEMs, suppliers, and integration partners understand how to apply the platform’s capabilities within their own architectures. Apex.OS 26-08 adds examples for DDS security, IPC access control, CAN with end-to-end protection, and QoS configuration.
These examples demonstrate concrete patterns for securing communication, protecting data across CAN, and configuring the behavior of distributed applications. They help teams move more quickly from evaluation to implementation, while making it easier to establish consistent practices across projects and vehicle variants.
From a certified product foundation to series production
Productization is the defining direction of Apex.OS 26-08. Support for a mixed-criticality environment, hardened by safety mechanisms and fully documented in the safety manual, combined with quality management processes and comprehensive validation, establishes Apex.OS as a dependable product foundation for automotive programs scaling into series production.
The surrounding improvements reinforce that direction. Production diagnostics make the platform fit more naturally into OEM workflows. IPC access control introduces a practical security boundary. New QNX and `aarch64` platforms broaden deployment options. Connector fixes reduce integration risk. Recording and shared-memory improvements support repeatable validation. Faster boot performance and Y2K38 robustness address the long operational life of the vehicle.
Series production is where software has to be repeatable—not only once, but across vehicles, variants, factories, service events, and years of operation. Apex.OS 26-08 takes another step toward that standard, helping automotive teams build systems that are not only capable, but also certifiable, integrable, and ready for the road.
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