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VMware Promises Multiple OSs On One Cellphone
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:28 PM
from the just-make-sure-i-can-strip-it-off-if-i-want dept.
from the just-make-sure-i-can-strip-it-off-if-i-want dept.
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.'"
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IT: Citrix XenServer Virtualization Platform Now Free 259 comments
Pedro writes "Citrix announced today that they are giving away their Xen OSS based virtualization platform XenServer with all the goodies included for free. The big highlights are XenMotion, which lets you move VMs from box to box without downtime, and multi server management. The same stuff in VMware land is $5k. They plan to sell new products for XenServer and also the same stuff on Microsoft's virtualization technology called Hyper-V. It will be interesting to see what VMware does. The announcement comes the day before VMware's big user event VMworld."
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All I Can Say Is It's About Bloody Time (Score:5, Funny)
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 [gizmodo.com] 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?
Re:All I Can Say Is It's About Bloody Time (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Sounds like a huge market.
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Lost in the discussion was the sales target: 100 units total.
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Wouldn't it be easier to just write an emulator for the smartphone CPU architecture to run on x86?
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Then they'd have to be responsible for the OS, rather than just profiling or virtualizing it.
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It would seem to me that most smartphone OS' would be hobbled by limited RAM were they to be virtualized on existing phone hardware.
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Not with so many flash cards out there these days. Flash tends to obviate the problem of where to store, and screen real estate in terms of pixels is small.
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Re:All I Can Say Is It's About Bloody Time (Score:5, Insightful)
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..
Parent
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the handset suppliers are seeing the device software as being part of their value-add,
Maybe they are hoping that the carriers will want to spec phones that just run their own branded OS image? That would simplify carrier's spec process, so I can see the appeal for them. Instead of detailing every little menu item and feature, they could simply require that it be "VmWare Compatible".
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See your point, but don't see how that gets round the problem of these devices being so tightly coupled, in terms of hw and os...would be a neat trick if you could ship stuff than ran under VM and was usable, despite the many different button placements, screen resolutions...
For example, I have a Blackberry Pearl - some Java apps are run fine, but are unusable from the UI standpoint.
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I agree that it seems unworkable - I was just speculating on their rationale.
I suppose that it COULD work, but phones would have to get a lot more standardized. Alternatively, they could just specify a touch screen and then the keyboard becomes optional.
Personally, I'd hate to see it because I think that the phone market is pretty "fun" with all of the innovation. Some things are just gimmicks, and others stick around. It'd be a shame to limit that market for the sake of standardization - it'd be similar to
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Personally, I'd hate to see it because I think that the phone market is pretty "fun" with all of the innovation.
With you on that one - although I wish they'd standardise on the charges and other cables - I have a drawful of chargers and headsets...
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Outside the US, anyway.
Inside the US, it matters not what the handset maker's software can do. Verizon cripples them all and puts their own shitware & UI on them.
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With something like Android, it takes little effort (e.g. a team of a few developers) to create support for a phone. See for example the time it takes to get android (basic support) on the FreeRunner.
Now as an end user, if I get the opportunity to flash out my phone easily to get access to an open platform, I'll do it very quickly. I did this with a PC, I don't see why I couldn't do it with a phone.
Split the carrier from the phone/os. Let the carrier be the ISP, and be done with that. The market is changing
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Maybe some people like their cell phones to make phone calls without needing a reboot every few days, or being loaded up with a gigabyte of software in memory who's only purpose is to look in the mirror and say "Who's a pretty girl? I'm a pretty girl! Who's a pretty girl..."
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But seriously -- in what drug-addled delusional model of reality does this even begin to make sense? Customers don't want to pay for the extra memory, and Telcos don't want to pay the additional support costs. Overall, you would think the mar
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Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I am betting this will be more like a HAL than a traditional virtual system.
OS vendors will write to VMWare and then any phone that supports VMware will run the OS.
No real porting effort required.
Just another layer of abstraction.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
Q: There are too many platforms. What should I do?
A: Make another platform!
Parent
Samsung? (Score:5, Informative)
I saw a demo by Samsung a while back of their ARM port of Xen running multiple operating systems on a mobile phone [xen.org]. 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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Give the manufacturers another 75 years and we might even have a fully integrated lifestyle technology solution.
Science fiction authors of the 70s and 80s never would have believed we'd be this slow getting there. We can't even have discussions with our houses about their appliances. Heck, most people can't even have the lights come on when they enter the room.
Sure, there are more pressing problems in the world, but... wouldn't you think household/lifestyle integrations would be progressing faster than they
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In other news... (Score:2)
"corporate phone personality", eh? So now my phone will be anal-retentive, calls will take 3-5 days before succeeding, and it'll come with this whiny voice asking me for the red stapler back? Will I have to ask permission to go to the bathroom too? This isn't what I signed up for when I became a geek. If I were the mother of these engineers, I'd force them to sing the entire set of all three High School Musical songs to them as punishment. And they would't be allowed to hangout with their friends in managem
Wrong tags (Score:2)
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"Someone was dumb" seemed like an adequate solution to me.
Another one.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another one.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Imagine behind able to transfer the entire state of your machine between different physical hardware.
So you're arguing for virtualizing the entire OS as a workaround for application vendors who can't be bothered to write configuration-migrating utilities? For a *cellphone*?
I know I'm getting old, but isn't that a *bit* of overkill? And if the vendor can't be bothered to understand their configuration file/database well enough to migrate just those settings, do you really want to be running their software at
Re:Another one.... (Score:4, Insightful)
A lower level abastraction layer below the java VM ... you mean like the OS itself?
All this VM stuff is becoming truely silly. Its really the OSes job to do all this crap, but since all the OS people can't get together in a sane manner, we have people making hardware virtualization to accomplish what the OS should be doing already.
All we're going to do is end up with a VMWare OS(Or Xen, KVM, virtual iron, insert your favorite here, sorry I don't remember it), and another second level OS running on top of it. (*BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows whatever).
This whole thing is just silly and completely redundant, not just on mobile phones but on standard PCs and servers.
We don't need a VM to get our jobs done, we need all the OS people to understand that we want common interfaces to code against, kinda like what POSIX sorta wanted to be but really wasn't.
The OS is supposed to be our hardware abstraction layer, not a hypervisor that does hardware abstraction so our OS can do hardware abstraction so our apps can not no anything about the multiple levels of hardware abstraction.
Parent
My computer (Score:2)
I am not yet running multiple OSes on my PC yet. I don't want them virtualized because (I figure) they'll run slower. I kinda feel that way about my phone too. Still they are looking ahead. It might help somebody/someday. So why not.
Will customers really want this ? (i.e. carriers) (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Will customers really want this ? (i.e. carrier (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Will customers really want this ? (i.e. carrier (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [acm.org].
Parent
Virtualization is the future, esp for desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Virtualization is the future, esp for desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Virtualization is the future, esp for desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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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.
But the strange thing is that the kind of work you can actually usefully do on these devices, really is all in your head. So time off from the computer, thinking, usually makes for a better product ...
M.
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I would mod you up if I had mod points right now. What you describe is very similar to what I would like to do.
There are 3 computers I use regularly, my work PC, my home PC, and my wife's PC. I would like to be able to switch between these interchangeably, with my entire "operating system" coming with me when I sit down at one of these PCs.
Right now I can partially achieve what I want by running VirtualBox or VMware (or whatever) and copying the "virtual hard drive" to/from my USB flash drive. However, the
VMware's vClient initiative (Score:4, Informative)
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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"But going forward"...did you swallow a marketbot?
Gerry
Ah multiple OS's, thats handy (Score:2)
Which one will the root shell be running in when I type reboot?
Serious question (Score:2)
What's the point?
You already have (in most smartphones) an operating system for the radio and one for the system the user sees.
I mean, is it necessary to run Android and Windows Mobile at the same time, or at all, on the same phone?
People might argue DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, but I argue right back, isn't it more intelligent to design software FOR AND ON the device your designing it for? I mean, I'm all for productivity, but it seems like you end up with better software beta testing it on the act
huh? (Score:2)
Except for developers what practical value will this be?