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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.'"
VMWare Promises Multiple OSs On One Cellphone
Just the other day I was having problems getting World of Warcraft working in Windows Mobile on my Heier Black Pearl Micro while at the same time using VMWare to host a wiki on a completely secure LAMP stack. Seriously guys, it's 2008--we've defeated our greatest fear (the polar bear) and we've elected an African American president--so why are cell phones still in the stone age? Is it really too much to ask for me to be able to play my favorite game and host some simple PHP pages while driving down the highway accepting incoming phone calls?
My work here is dung.
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 saw a demo by Samsung a while back of their ARM port of Xen running multiple operating systems on a mobile phone. Not sure what the status of the technology is now, but they had some pretty nice ideas with the driver model and were talking about live-migrating your VM from your phone to your TV when you got home.
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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.
Aside from the obvious technical hurtles (underpowered CPUs, insufficient memory, insufficient flash ROM to store multiple OSs, few user-installable mobile OSs with device-specific "plug'n'play" support, etc), there would seem to be one glaring obstacle... the carriers.
Lest anyone forget, the true customers for mobile devices are not individual consumers, but the carriers. And it is going to be a long time, if ever, before that will change. Indeed recent trends continue, if not increase, the extent of device-carrier lock-in, although often in more subtle ways that simply a software lock. The biggest trend is non-interoperable data services, either via authentication protocols that are carrier-specific, or simply spectrum differences (e.g. Tmobile's 3G bands are different than AT&T's or European 3G bands, even though all are considered "GSM").
So given 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. Mobile OSs are not licensed by individual customers, and they are totally not set up to be installed on arbitrary mobile hardware. For example, a Palm 700p and a 700w are almost the same hardware, but it is not possible and no one has even tried to put PalmOS from the 700p on a 700w, or vice versa, WinMo from the 700w to a 700p. The only notable efforts in this vein are attempts to port Android to HTC WinMo devices (with marginal but possible future success). However that is only possible because Android is open source. And there is not obvious benefit to the carrier for doing this...
Indeed carriers, particularly Verizon (but all of them) generally try to restrict and remove features intrinsic to OEM devices (e.g. phone as modem features, WiFi, MMS, app suites like Pocket Office), in order to limit the individual customer's capabilities and force the carriers customers into specific "business models" for services (e.g. pay extra for phone as model, pay for data instead of free Wifi, etc). The freedom to run multiple OSs would necessarily give individual customers to circumvent these artificial, deliberate carrier-imposed restrictions -- something the carriers obviously would not want.
All in all sounds like a huge amount of work required with little upside for the real customers, i.e. the carriers. Until the wireless networks are truly "open access", with the power of device choice in the hands of consumers, not the carriers, the effort of multiple OSs seems doomed to failure...
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.
Perhaps in the United States. In most of Europe all the phones are not subsidized by the carriers, are paid by the customers and are unlocked.
Data, networks, frequencies. They are all standard and can be connected to with any phone on the market.
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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For those of you thinking that this is a solution in search of a problem, let me outline where VMware is going with this.
At VMworld this year, Paul Maritz (VMware CEO) outlined their strategy for the future of the desktop - a world where users are given access to applications and data regardless of the end device. Today we see desktops as more device-centric, rather than people centric. VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a step in the direction of device-independence. It doesn't matter if I'm at work, at home, or on the road, I can get to the same desktop, applications, and data.
But going forward VMware is looking at delivering the entire desktop steamed down as a VM to a "client hypervisor", so instead of viewing as it runs remotely in a datacenter, the data is streamed down and processed locally so there's no lag induced by a high-latency link or something like that.
This works great for ordinary PCs or x86-based thin clients. Where VMware is going is taking their hypervisor layer and moving it to the mobile device, so that a user can get their same desktop (or a subset of its functionality) even from their PDA/smartphone. That's the purpose of this technology long term - it's not so you can run Android in a VM on your iPhone.
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