Comment by beagle3

QNX was a true microkernel architecture that worked, and worked well. The basic building block was called IIRC Send/Receive/Reply: Every "system" call looked like a regular function call, but would "Send" a message to a different process, and (usually) suspend the caller; The other process would "Receive", do whatever was requested, and "Reply", at which point control went back (with the response) to the calling process. IIRC it was also possibly to do async calls, but in that case the other process would call ("Send") the response back, rather than "Reply". I might be confusing this with another system though.

device drivers weren't privileged - they were just another process you called into, and could be restarted in the case of a fault (rather than kernel panic or blue screen).

A system that doesn't provide this is not an alternative to QNX; It's just another operating system (which are all, in some ways, alternative to each other and thus QNX, but ...)