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VMware Promises Multiple OSs On One Cellphone
superglaze writes to tell us that VMware has announced a large effort behind their Mobile Virtualization Platform, promising the possibility of multiple operating systems on mobile devices. "The company described MVP as a 'thin layer of software' that will be embedded in handsets and 'be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.' Asked whether MVP would offer something different from the abstraction already provided by mobile Java, VMware's European product director Fredrik Sjostedt told ZDNet UK that MVP would require less recoding. 'If you want to have an application run on a Java-specific appliance, you need to code it for Java,' Sjostedt said. 'What we're introducing with MVP is an [embedded] abstraction layer below that, between the physical hardware and the software layer.'"
Fine. My cell has a crappy OS, but I don't think it will be better if I jam a second or third crappy OS onto it.
I suspect this is yet another project in which a company asked, "can we do it?" without asking, "should we do it?" I doubt much of a market exists for users that want to run more than one OS on a cell phone. Also, abstraction layer the company and article speak of sounds similar to the Java virtual machine, but on a slightly lower level. I am not very familiar with complex mobile devices, but can see very little benefit in creating another layer of abstraction at a lower level to simply allow quicker development of programs, when developers can already do that with Java if they want programs portable amongst devices.
It might be that you guys don't understand the benefits, but now that cell phones become part of the virtualization game, it really means that you can extend things almost anywhere. Think about what happened when the Internet moved out to cell phones, people are instantly connected to everything they want. They can communicate, etc from anywhere in the world.
If you can virtualize your desktop onto your cell phone, think about the possibilities. You're working at your desk and then you need to go on a trip to a different country. You "download" your desktop onto your cell phone/iPhone or whatever, and then you can keep working, and even maintain network connectivity. By the time this becomes mainstream, I'm sure cell phones will have multi-GHz equivalent chips with 20+ gb storage. Then, when you get to the hotel, you connect up your cell phone to the hotel's docking system with monitor and keyboard, etc.
You keep working, and then when you get back to the office, just transfer your virtual machine back onto your desktop. Or, if you want, just keep working from your cell phone.
Who knows what the possibilities will be, but this seems to be the point. Processors aren't getting much faster, guys, and the applications that need them have pretty much ended. I'm still using my 1 GHz laptop from 2004 without skipping a beat, and I don't imagine things needing much more than this for the next 5 years. I'm sure within a few years the cell phones will be more powerful than this.
why exactly would a carrier be interested in provide its customers with the ability to run multiple OSs on their mobile devices. And it is far more complicated from a technical and licensing standpoint than on a generic PC.
Maybe because it makes licensing simpler!
Suppose you want your phone to run Linux, and you'd like the users to be able to install their own kernels and whatever other software they want, but you need to stop them messing with the GSM/3G stack in order to satisfy the FCC and the carrier. How do you do it? Answer: use virtualisation to split the software environment into two parts - "secure" and "open". Now your users get what they want (open software environment), and so do the carriers (some parts are still locked down).
This is cheaper than the other way to solve the problem (using two separate computers). It also uses less energy. Even if a company doesn't care about Linux, they might still want to run complex consumer applications on their phones, requiring strong separation of privileges that are hard to assure in a large consumer OS kernel. x86 Windows XP on a phone? With a CPU like Intel Atom, hypervisor-level security and "PC on a chip" hardware, why not?
There's enough reason to do this that all the mobile phone companies are involved with it in some way. Somebody mentioned a Xen version of this VMware system, and there's a port of L4 being made for this purpose as well.
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Why they would want they do that? Increasingly, the handset suppliers are seeing the device software as being part of their value-add, brand differentiation and protection.
They don't want M$, Google Android or FOSS. Think iPhone.
Sounds like needless complexity on devices already challenged by small form factor, (memeory, battery lifre, CPU power...)
The only thing that could temp me would be security - open email (and attachments) in a VM wihout risking crashing - or infecting - my phone, which I also might be using for GPS navigation - hmmmm..
Wouldn't it be easier to just write an emulator for the smartphone CPU architecture to run on x86?
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