Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

After testing VMware software as a project for work (ESXi, vSphere, workstation, etc) I was interested to know if there are any community plans to look at creating a hypervisor for N900 (and/or other devices) and if not, why not?

I know there was a youtube video from some tech fair showcasing VMware stuff on the N900 (running droid and another OS - cant remember which one now) and also VMware are currently working on MVP (mobile virtualisation platform) so there may be something in the pipeline that will be available, however....

this probably won't be cheap and may not be available to the end user, I can see them just licencing this for commerical uses.

I know there is a lot of talk about Maemo/MeeGo/other OS's running on the N900, but wouldn't it be nice to not have to re-develop a new OS everytime one comes out to work on a specific device......rather lets develop hypervisors for each device, then we can run what we want :D

Also I know there is talk of the drivers/other source code being closed which are needed to get things working (abill_uk's thread springs to mind) but would we need the actual drivers/middleware closed stuff, to be fully open source to create a hypervisor??

My knowledge is limited when it comes to the middleware/drivers/kernel sort of areas that are obvisously involved with creating/modifing OS's to run on different devices....

.....but maybe an ARM based hypervisor (plus middleware/drivers for a specific device) may skirt the whole problem entirely and we could run what ever OS's we wanted as VM's.

I know this topic has been touched on before as well as shot down (to soon I think), but Xen are currently working on an ARM based hypervisor so it's not a completely stupid idea :)

.....plus it might help stop the Maemo Vs MeeGo bashing, that everyone seems keen on at the moment! :)

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

VmWare already has this. It's called Mobile Virtualization Platform but it's for Android as host.
As far as I understand there's technically no obstacle from making the n900 as a host. The guest platform at the moment is Android only from what I know.

Is this something the community is really interested in?

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

As to the VMware stuff, I know, I mentioned that in my post, as for "android as host" I'm not sure what you mean? The hypervisor is installed on hardware (not software related)? And neither should the guest OS's be? So it would be possible to use what we have at the moment to create a hypervisor for specific devices or one that covers many devices? And by that I don't mean "Vmware player" app, I mean a true bare-metal hypervisor (if that's what you meant about being for Android)?

Well, I was asking whether or not a "hypervisor solution" was something of interest to the community? And seeing the amount of replies I guess not....... personally I think it's a good idea, unless someone wants to give me a reason why it isn't or can't be done rather than just tagging the thread as "just shoot me", glad to see the support here is as strong as ever!

Personally I think that talking about this, as solution to some of the multi-OS device (that I guess we all want) solutions, is better than commenting on whether or not abill_uk should be banned from the forum.....just my opinion.....or should I have done a poll instead???

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

u-boot enables you to dual-boot maemo and meego. Could you explain what will be the advantage of having hypervisor ?

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

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.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

My bad - should have posted when I was more awake. Not that I'm in any better shape right now, but I'll give it a shot ;)

Looks like you're talking about the equivalent of ESX rather than workstation. I'm not sure why a hypervisor approach would be better.
Hypervisors are better when you're trying to get multiple OS instances running without having the base OS hogging more resources that it absolutely must.
I don't see the point of a hypervisor on my phone .... yet. There's bound to be a day when my phone has enough processing power and enough battery life and infinite bandwidth to run multiple OS instances on it...
But for the moment, I'd like it if even one runs well.

About the tags, just ignore them. It's just some suicidal attention seeking idiot who doesn't have the guts to shoot himself.
About abill_uk: Shhh. Hopefully he wont come to this thread and ruin it.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

i tend to be against running a virtualization layer on mobile hardware at the moment. it's not powerful enough for most useful workloads.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

Well like my initial post was hinting at, u-boot and other "booting" methods give us two/three options tops, with a hypervisor you can have as many images of os's as you like and just pick and choose, so we could have a lot more than just maemo/meego, plus we can just shut one down and start another one up, and then flick back to the original one without having to re-boot etc.

There are lot of advantages to have this rather than u-boot, whether or not the advantages out weigh the amount of work needed to create it is another matter.... :)

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

True, the hardware would probably struggle with more than a couple of guest OS's running at once, and that is depending on how "bare-metal" you could get the HV, plus we would have the downside of having to have the VM console, which the likes of ESXi don't. I do agree it sounds like it would be slow (at best)...

But I was thinking long term as well as current solution, as hardware improves, it would just be a case of adding the hardware support to the HV and we could install it.

That was kind of my point as well, wouldn't it be easier to just keep changing and adding to a HV for each new device - I guess just adding the HW drivers each time - rather than editing each new OS that comes out? Surely this way, the community could just maintain a single piece of software (the HV) and then the user would have the option to install any other OS's without them having to be edited, seems like less work to me....

Sorry if that didn't make much sense, it's early :)

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

lol same here, far to early!

Yeah bascially I was talking about ESXi, with a UI, as running a workstation type "app" wouldn't work because Maemo would be using to much of the HW resources.

Well I see what you mean about the HW issue, it does seem as if others agree that the HW (for the moment) doesn't seem upto it, however long term would it not be better to look at this as a solution (for arguement are on above posts) :) However, I don't think we are giving the HW enough credit, that youtube vid I saw of VMware was on the N900 and it looked quick (well the HV and console) not sure what would happen if you added any real load to either OS. It was probably just proof of concept....

Well the tag just pi**ed me off, should have maybe moaned about that in a seperate post, that wasn't aimed at anyone, its just annoying that the person would rather tag, than comment, if its such a stupid idea, come on here and tell me why.... :)

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.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

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.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

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

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

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.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

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.


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? :)

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

Free versions to play with would be nice, but VmWare is a business and without competition nothings going to be free.

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.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

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.

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).

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.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

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 :)


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 :)

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

lol yeah I know the tricker bits like load balancing and stuff would bulk out the HV a bit, but it might solve some of the issues for a small cost in performance.

Well that doesn't look very good then, I don't know much about Maverick, but I'll have a read about it, is that slim or bloated? The ESXi box I built and tested worked extremely well, but it was a lot higher spec than mobile devices, but then again I was running a lot of VM to test it properly...

The main problem I found was the hardware support, the free version of ESXi from VMware covers a lot of hardware, but I had to buy a gigabit intel NIC because the on board wasn't supported, so I can see (if this ever does work) the hardware support/drivers would be an issue anyway, especially if they are closed, as I guess that would make things even more difficult....

As for why, your right, easy deb takes care of most of my needs, but VMs have a load of plus points too, I think it is a case of what you use personally, but I do agree the easy deb route is brilliant without a doubt, and we do have uboot/multi-boot as well...... just thinking about the future....and furthering this sort of application of VMs would be a good thing :)

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

Ubuntu Maverick. I'll get around to running Unity 2D with GLES acceleration sometime.

If we do get a HV on the N900, whee, switching back and forth between Maemo, Android and MeeGo!

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

Just out of curiosity, is this the type of thing that you were thinking of? Super Jumbo

The thread has not been updated for a few weeks now, (would like to hear how the progress is going myself) but it is a very nice teaser of what could be possible.

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

Completely agree, one great OS is definatly the way forward...but none of them are quite there yet... and im guessing there will always be apps that are only available on one....unfortunately....

although VM probably isn't the best way while the hardware hasn't caught up, it eventually will and I do believe VM style systems have a lot of very useful applications, some are listed below (on gazza_d's post).

Don't get me wrong I really do like Maemo, and your right chroot solves some of the missing features, however I do think it is worth looking into...:)

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

Ok, ill have to read up on it.

LOL yeah it would be nice to just flick between the three :D

Re: Hypervisor for N900 (and others)....would anyone be interested?
 

Hey, now that is interesting! Looks very cool

Not exactly what I was thinking of, but a step in the right direction for sure!

Very tempted to go out and buy a beagleboard now! :D