Originally Posted by gazza_d

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.

Originally Posted by Hurrian

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.

Originally Posted by davedickson

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.

Originally Posted by uvatbc

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.

Originally Posted by uvatbc

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.

Originally Posted by davedickson

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.

Originally Posted by davedickson

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?

Originally Posted by davedickson

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

Originally Posted by uvatbc

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

Originally Posted by uvatbc

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.