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frank.wagner is offline frank.wagner
2009-01-16 , 06:21
Posts: 101 | Thanked: 8 times | Joined on Mar 2007
#1
Hi,

what does this mean for Maemo and future Nokia N900 ???

http://www.ok-labs.com/

http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS2032670938.html
Jan. 15, 2009

Embedded hypervisor vendor Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) announced that it has received $7.6 million in new venture capital funding. Investments from Chrysalis Ventures, Neo Technology Ventures, and thin-client giant Citrix Systems signal a major boost for the mobile virtualization vendor -- and possibly a pending acquisition by Citrix.

Chrysalis Ventures led the investment round, with Neo adding to a previous investment, and Citrix investing an undisclosed amount for the first time. OK Labs says it will use the investment to fund global expansion of its research and development and business channels, and to extend regional support throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The company also said it hopes to benefit from the expertise of Chrysalis Ventures partners like John Willmoth, a former senior executive at Sprint Nextel.

Any VC investment in the current financial crunch and recession is newsworthy, especially considering the financial troubles of fellow embedded virtualization vendor VirtualLogix, which recently announced layoffs and management changes. Meanwhile, another competitor in the embedded virtualization space, Trango, was recently acquired by VMWare. (In the embedded products industry at large, meanwhile, Motorola today announced it would lay off an additional 4,000 workers after announcing a 3,000-employee cut last Fall, with 3,000 of the new layoffs occurring in the Mobile Devices business.)

According to OK Labs, its Linux-ready OKL4 microkernel for processor virtualization is deployed in 250 million handsets and other mobile and embedded devices. OKL4 is a microkernel OS that runs almost everything in userspace. The OS includes a thin hardware abstraction layer that can support Linux, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, Symbian, and/or other guest OSes. It also includes a minimal POSIX-compliant execution environment, enabling multiple applications and device drivers to run in separate, isolated partitions. Last month, OK Labs announced that OKL4 will support devices using ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 MP Core multi-core CPUs.
 
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Stskeeps is offline Stskeeps
2009-01-16 , 09:17
Posts: 1,671 | Thanked: 11,478 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ Warsaw, Poland
#2
Nothing, whatsoever.

Being able to virtualize Linux using the L4 microkernel isn't exactly a new thing. If anything, it could allow payment security, SIM access etc to co-exist in seperate partitions, but the later mention of running several OS at the same time isn't exactly power saving

It just says, it's possible to virtualize Linux & other OS'es, use the L4 kernel as a sorts of HAL as to abstract away hardware differences. Sure, virtualization is a neat trick on tablets, but only for intentionally seperating stuff like payment services, signing, etc into seperate address spaces the Linux kernel cannot touch.

But what effect it will have on Maemo or N900? Who knows. Really. It just confirms that the tablets are versatile devices that can be bent, shaped and broken by the user in many different ways (in a metaphorical sense) and not just locked down embedded systems.
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YoDude is offline YoDude
2009-01-16 , 13:15
Posts: 2,869 | Thanked: 1,784 times | Joined on Feb 2007 @ Po' Bo'. PA
#3
Originally Posted by Stskeeps
...If anything, it could allow payment security, SIM access etc to co-exist in seperate partitions...

Bingo! ...
 
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