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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.
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.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
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..
You are using "virtualize" in the marketing sense. There is no good reason to virtualize the entire OS of a desktop machine just so that you can copy your documents and preferences to a cellphone and back. That's not using a sledgehammer instead of a flyswatter. It's building a fleet of space-tugs, sending them to the asteroid belt to bring back asteroids, and then dropping those asteroids from orbit onto the flies.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
No, you get it, you're being far too small-minded about this. You have this single concept of what virtualization should be, and you're wrong because you can't see what it could bring in the future.
It's not about copying your documents back and forth. The entire interaction between you and your computer totally changes. Why exactly do I care where my desktop is running as long as I have access to it. Do I really want to copy my documents back and forth onto a single USB drive? Yeah, that's how we do it right now, but why even bother? Why not just have a single copy of my "desktop" and move it around from location to location. Who knows, maybe the cell phone will be the desktop in the future, and you just switch form factors depending on where you are or what you want to do. Virtualization is the first step to this, creating a homogeneous environment.
Look at the difference between having your POP3 client vs having all your mail on Gmail. Would you consider that the same as dropping asteroids onto a fly? With a POP3 client, you need to copy around all your mail files whenever you want to move around, you need to know the specific server settings, etc. I know this because my mother-in-law came over last month and needed me to set up her POP3 client for her because it didn't work here. If she used Gmail, things would "just work". Same thing goes with virtualization, you can copy your documents around, but maybe the computer you're using doesn't have the same set up. Maybe the versions of MS Word are different, etc.
Moving this concept out to cell phones is the next step, just like it was for email. I think it will take another 5 years, but I'm sure it's on its way. People will probably be docking their iPhones at work to download the desktop, working from home from their home docking station, etc.