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.... :)