VMware Demos Two Operating Systems On Mobile Phone 52
nk497 writes "Virtualisation firm VMware has demonstrated its new mobile virtualisation platform, which allows two operating systems to be used at the same time on a single device. On stage at its European conference, VMware reps used a touchscreen Nokia N800 — more of a tablet computer than a phone — with a prototype of its hypervisor to boot and run both Windows CE and Google's Android, at the same time. The firm has yet to announce when such tech will be found in phones."
It's about time (Score:5, Funny)
I am SO tired of having to dual boot my phone just to get the great internal features of Google Android alongside the application support of Windows mobile. Finally, I can take advantage of the spare storage, memory, and CPU capacity dwelling on my phone and simply run both at the same time! VMware, you have done it again!
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...remove stains, feed a hungry family of four, earn you more tax rebates, keep weeds off your lawn, clean your clogged drains, polish wood furniture, clean and protect counter-tops, AND increase the MPG of your SUV?
For that, my other pocket will always be for carrying the Pomegranate phone: http://www.pomegranatephone.com/ [pomegranatephone.com]
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But, can you make phone calls on it? That wasn't demoed, and what happens when both operating systems try to use the radio stack at the same time?
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The mobile stack is implemented as not much more than a serial port, so the virtualization layer will be able to handle it the same way the desktop version would share a modem between multiple guests. That is, it would be trivial.
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The real question is whether the hypervisor implements proper looback so that one VM can call the other one. :-)
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Well TFS does say it's "more of a tablet computer than a phone".
I am familar with
a) this gadget and it's not a phone at all, not even a little bit round the edges
and
b) the construction "not so much an X as a Y", which is normally used to imply that it is an X, albeit not a good one and it shouldn't give up the day job, to whit being a Y.
But then a) I actually have a reasonable command of English and b) I'm not a slashdot editor. Tautology? You, dear reader, must decide.
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But, if it really is all virtualized, you could then move the VM of your OS(s) to your new phone without ever having to worry about where your phone book is stored again
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Too true! Not only is rebooting a pain, but you miss a lot of calls that way....
Anyone else seeing a point in this? (Score:2, Interesting)
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There is already a Windows Mobile emulator for desktop pcs, so all that is needed is for someone to make an Android emulator.
These of course are emulators, not virtualisers, because you are running an ARM platform on an Intel machine.
Re:Anyone else seeing a point in this? (Score:4, Informative)
[...] so all that is needed is for someone to make an Android emulator.
The Android SDK comes with a development emulator for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Does the job quite nicely, I'd say.
Finally (Score:3, Funny)
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at a At a performance of around 1/(n*1.05) the speed of the origional CPU where n is the number of visualization.
So without and vm = n=0 we get the speed of a single device. When you have a millions VS running you get 1000000*1/(1000000*1.05) = 1000000/1050000 = roughly 0.95
so with a Beowulf you loose 5% performance.
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Really? Without a VM it runs at a speed of NaN or DivideByZeroError?
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Think NaN's are bad?
You should have seen what happened when VM development was just starting out.
A BASIC program consisting of a single comment "VM code goes here" on an old Tandy Model I was well on its way to sentience before someone managed to code up the first few stub routines and get things under control. It was a close call. I was there, and I was shitting myself, it was that close. Couldn't sleep for months afterwards.
Always remember kids - left to it's own devices, a VM will kill you and everyone y
yay (Score:2)
Just what I never wanted.
It has to be said... (Score:2)
Two OSes, One Phone.
I'd be lying if I said that wasn't the first thing I thought of when I read the headline.
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Easy. Think about business smart phone deployment. You have 1000 Symbian phones which must have same kind of software with same settings to manage.
You update the virtual machine instead of all that OTA mess.
The opposite of news (Score:3, Informative)
The N800 is not a mobile phone. It doesn't have any kind of radio capable of communicating with the cellular network. This is just virtualization of a generic ARM device.
Is virtualization of ARM new? Not really, the first time I saw it done was at the XenSummit in early 2007, when Samsung had a Xen-based hypervisor running on an ARM handheld. So, well done VMWare, you've done something that isn't what the headline says and was first done at least two years ago by one of your competitors.
If we're talking about a consumer-grade shipping product, then it's a different matter, but a demonstration is underwhelming. And didn't VMWare demo this about six months ago?
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The N810 is still pretty expensive on this side of the pond (around three times the price of the N800 for some reason). It's not really very attractive when compared to the new generation of ARM devices built around the OMAP3530 or i.MX515, with at least 256MB of RAM, a 600-1.2GHz Cortex A8 ARM core, a DSP that can handle 720p H.264, and an OpenGL ES 2.0 DSP.
I have a 770 (the N800's predecessor) that I'm looking to replace, and currently nothing from Nokia is compelling.
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wonderful ! (Score:2)
But does it run xenserver ?
Already done it .... (Score:1)
For what it's worth (and it's totally pointless unless you're a fan of Microsoft's Solitaire), you can already run (http://atomicvindaloo.com/?p=324) Windows 3.1 on the N95 8GB
Battery drownage? (Score:1)
It must have an substantial drownage of battery life needing to run vm's...
Or not?