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-   -   Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested? (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=73544)

gazza_d 2011-05-29 07:00
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
vmware did demo a "hypervisor" on an N800 a few years ago where 2 or 3 mobile OSes were running concurrently, and you were able to switch between them. Basically multitasking for OSes. thread is here

This would be useful and cool, especially where there are different apps availablr on different platforms.

davedickson 2011-05-29 07:30
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by gazza_d (Post 1017799)
vmware did demo a "hypervisor" on an N800 a few years ago where 2 or 3 mobile OSes were running concurrently, and you were able to switch between them. Basically multitasking for OSes. thread is here

This would be useful and cool, especially where there are different apps availablr on different platforms.
Sorry missed that thread completely! :) I did do a search before starting this thread and saw a few but not that one!

So if VMware were doing this 2/3 years ago, were is the progress and why wasn't this idea pushed back then, by the community?

Honestly I am missing a step here, is this actually too difficult to do, or do you need access to the closed source or something? Also I think your right to say "hypervisor", I don't really like using that term, so it should be in quotes.

It would be so useful as you say, and it looks like a few others from the thread would agree! Also the apps, another good reason to have multiple OS's is you don't have the sit around waiting for them to ported to your OS! Or try and do it yourself and fail :)

Also the commerial Vs end-user aspect was mentioned on that thread (as I mention on my initial post), I guess they won't let us get into the HV, its going to come pre-packaged on the devices, with guest OS's pre-installed. Balls.

davedickson 2011-05-29 08:01
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hurrian (Post 1017727)
Have fun working with 256MB RAM and slow-*** swap! Unless you're running X-less instances of Gentoo on the puny 2009-era ARM core.

An ARM HV would be great... on an A9/A15 multicore.

Not saying that it isn't possible, I mean it would be cool to run Xen (or something closer to bare metal, I guess), but let's say we have XLV-1150-1150, 128/128 MB physical RAM slices and 1GB of swap for each, one on MMC and other on eMMC, displays exported over VNC/X-Forwarding, and probably a VM Monitor on the phone. That's still a rather slow environment for... LXDE? You aren't running anything more than Firefox or a few tabs in Chromium.
Oh, and on second thoughts (now I have had my morning coffee) you wouldn't need to chop up the hardware, pre-allocated space, memory and load balancing might help with that, you wouldn't have to assign memory/other resources on a VM by VM basis, if your using one VM it would run with all the hardware available, until you wanted to use the other one, and unless your loading (running apps on) both at the same time it wouldn't be an issue, but for most people it would be a case of only using one VM at a time anyway......

Like the other day, I was messing around with workstation (which is installed on my works Win7) and I wanted to convert .vdi to .vmdk

I found a nice way to do this on Linux (doing the conversion on Windows was messy), so just powered up Ubuntu, transferred the original .vdi file to the VM, converted the file, transferred the new . vmdk file back to Windows, shut down Ubuntu, job done, with no re-booting etc

uvatbc 2011-05-29 08:48
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by davedickson (Post 1017811)
Sorry missed that thread completely! :) I did do a search before starting this thread and saw a few but not that one!

So if VMware were doing this 2/3 years ago, were is the progress and why wasn't this idea pushed back then, by the community?

Honestly I am missing a step here, is this actually too difficult to do, or do you need access to the closed source or something? Also I think your right to say "hypervisor", I don't really like using that term, so it should be in quotes.

It would be so useful as you say, and it looks like a few others from the thread would agree! Also the apps, another good reason to have multiple OS's is you don't have the sit around waiting for them to ported to your OS! Or try and do it yourself and fail :)

Also the commerial Vs end-user aspect was mentioned on that thread (as I mention on my initial post), I guess they won't let us get into the HV, its going to come pre-packaged on the devices, with guest OS's pre-installed. Balls.
The specific use case that VmWare is pushing is more from an isolation point of view.
More and more people are using their smart phones as "the one device that does it all". From a security point of view, most IT departments prefer isolation between your work phone and personal phone.
VmWare is aiming to satisfy both by providing isolation and a single smartphone.
This should appeal to the IT admins who can then control the business phone vm to whatever levels of strictness while not bothering with the personal phone vm on which the user can load up Angry Birds or pics or Facebook.
Since there is isolation, it would be extremely difficult to mistakenly share confidential documents into Facebook.
Also, work vm can be provisioned and wiped independent of your personal stuff.
If you change jobs and you don't need to surrender your smart phone - your old company's IT just de-provisions the work vm remotely and you're on your way to the new company, where the new IT provisions a different VM.

I'm waiting for the phone that has enough juice to do this without making me want to throw the slow piece of s*** out the window.

davedickson 2011-05-29 09:02
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by uvatbc (Post 1017826)
The specific use case that VmWare is pushing is more from an isolation point of view.
More and more people are using their smart phones as "the one device that does it all". From a security point of view, most IT departments prefer isolation between your work phone and personal phone.
VmWare is aiming to satisfy both by providing isolation and a single smartphone.
This should appeal to the IT admins who can then control the business phone vm to whatever levels of strictness while not bothering with the personal phone vm on which the user can load up Angry Birds or pics or Facebook.
Since there is isolation, it would be extremely difficult to mistakenly share confidential documents into Facebook.
Also, work vm can be provisioned and wiped independent of your personal stuff.
If you change jobs and you don't need to surrender your smart phone - your old company's IT just de-provisions the work vm remotely and you're on your way to the new company, where the new IT provisions a different VM.
Well it makes sense, having VMs is great on my laptop, to do just that type of thing, still with security in mind, but more about seperating work and personal stuff, like having bit torrent clients is a HUGE no no on our work machines, but having a VM skirts the issue. I can understand where they are coming from completely, I just hope they see the light and let us "end users" have a cut down free version, or maybe even open source (yeah, right). I would just hate to see the technology not be fully utilised and just used for commerical applications, this would be so useful for the end user as well as the IT dept.


Quote:
Originally Posted by uvatbc (Post 1017826)
I'm waiting for the phone that has enough juice to do this without making me want to throw the slow piece of s*** out the window.
lol so the general concensus is the hardware on the N900 (which is the best we have at the moment) isn't good enough to do what we want it to do, even with memory sharing/load balancing. If we do end up with decent hardware two or three devices down the line, do you think this is an area worth looking at again, or just stick with uboot/multiboot as the solution to multiple OS's? :)

uvatbc 2011-05-29 09:35
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by davedickson (Post 1017836)
Well it makes sense, having VMs is great on my laptop, to do just that type of thing, still with security in mind, but more about seperating work and personal stuff, like having bit torrent clients is a HUGE no no on our work machines, but having a VM skirts the issue. I can understand where they are coming from completely, I just hope they see the light and let us "end users" have a cut down free version, or maybe even open source (yeah, right). I would just hate to see the technology not be fully utilised and just used for commerical applications, this would be so useful for the end user as well as the IT dept.
Free versions to play with would be nice, but VmWare is a business and without competition nothings going to be free.

Quote:
Originally Posted by davedickson (Post 1017836)
lol so the general concensus is the hardware on the N900 (which is the best we have at the moment) isn't good enough to do what we want it to do, even with memory sharing/load balancing. If we do end up with decent hardware two or three devices down the line, do you think this is an area worth looking at again, or just stick with uboot/multiboot as the solution to multiple OS's? :)
I'd wager that smartphones will go through most of the history of the laptop at a much accelerated pace. Battery life is going to be primary limiting factor for a long time even if we get over the cpu performance limitations.
For the moment uboot is the answer. Soon... maybe by the year end, there should be first realistic forays into using VMs on smart phones - not just as a poc, but for real.

Hurrian 2011-05-29 10:13
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by davedickson (Post 1017819)
Oh, and on second thoughts (now I have had my morning coffee) you wouldn't need to chop up the hardware, pre-allocated space, memory and load balancing might help with that, you wouldn't have to assign memory/other resources on a VM by VM basis, if your using one VM it would run with all the hardware available, until you wanted to use the other one, and unless your loading (running apps on) both at the same time it wouldn't be an issue, but for most people it would be a case of only using one VM at a time anyway......

Like the other day, I was messing around with workstation (which is installed on my works Win7) and I wanted to convert .vdi to .vmdk
Dynamic allocation :D
...means a bigger HV, probably a balloon driver for the guests too. BTW, I just ran Maverick this morning on an old Celeron machine with 128 MB RAM. It was painful, even if I had a MX440 to help out.

I really don't know what you'd like to run in a HV that you can't run in a chroot. Probably quick-switching between {Android,Desktop-Ubuntu/Debian/Gentoo/LFS/Redhat/Fedora/Arch,MeeGo,Maemo}. BRB, buying a 64 GB uSDXC. I think we're going to need the r/w speeds and raw flash size.

RobbieThe1st 2011-05-29 11:24
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
I don't see the /point/ of running multiple OSes on a desktop, and especially not on a phone.
I mean, why do it? The only reason I can think of is "applications from one OS not working on another".
I think the /solution/ is to simply have /one/ good OS that can have anything you want loaded on it. Maemo's a good example: We don't /need/ to dual-boot Linux usually, because we either have it natively or can run a Debian(etc) chroot.
It's the same with Android: Instead of focusing on making Android boot, we should be thinking in terms of Alien Dalvek and making our main OS(Maemo) better. That way, you get the same advantages of having multiple OSes, without the time spent switching, the loss of processing power/worse battery life...

Now, perhaps Maemo's not going to be the end-all-be-all OS, but we should be thinking in terms of that instead of VMing everything(which /will/ reduce performance).

gazza_d 2011-05-29 12:14
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
there are several reasons why you may want to run virtual machines on one lump of hardware, be that a server, desktop, laptop, or mobile.

a) apps which are not available for that os
b) apps which do not coexist, or for having different versions for testing and development purposes
c) sandboxing for say bittorrrents so that services or hosts are not exposed needlessly.
d) assurance. a specific example here is secure access to corporate email which is an issue where i work. i could have a secure vm on my mobile device in the future, whereas now i have seperate devices.

I think virtualisation will take off in the mobile world for specific areas such as security compliance, i think app virtualisation will the big area though for the mass consumer market. so that apps for one platform can be ran on another. that may be via cloud based services though

one more thing, vmware is a business, but a lot of their products are available to use free for basic use, which can then be used as a foot in the door. that could well happen if they see an oppurtunity here, which they seem to have not done so yet.

davedickson 2011-05-29 13:49
Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by uvatbc (Post 1017852)
Free versions to play with would be nice, but VmWare is a business and without competition nothings going to be free.
Well they do offer free trials of some the software, and also the player and standalone convertor are free (and open source) so hopefully they will do a cut down version for free lol :)


Quote:
Originally Posted by uvatbc (Post 1017852)
I'd wager that smartphones will go through most of the history of the laptop at a much accelerated pace. Battery life is going to be primary limiting factor for a long time even if we get over the cpu performance limitations.
For the moment uboot is the answer. Soon... maybe by the year end, there should be first realistic forays into using VMs on smart phones - not just as a poc, but for real.
Well it makes sense, and hopefully we'll miss some of steps that laptops did, and get straight into the good stuff :D

I agree battery life is a real concern, but there are new technologies coming through, so hopefully that side of things will progress at the same pace. Well if we get decent tech on the N9 or maybe the device after that, then your right hopefully we will see some good implimentation of VM stuff soon... it would be a real plus.

It would be nice to sync these machines between laptop/desktop/mobile that would be a real plus for me :)


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