250 Cloud Computing
from mozilla.org and are also open source. Figure 9.17 shows an inbox in
OpenOffice email.
For mobile users, traveling often involves downtime, sitting on a plane
or in an airport or hotel lobby. FBReader is an ebook reader included with
Ubuntu MID. FBReader works on Linux, Windows XP/Vista, FreeBSD,
and various other Linux-based mobile operating systems. FBReader is dis-
tributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. It supports many ebook for-
mats, such as fb2 ebook format, HTML, CHM, plucker, Palmdoc,
zTxt,TCR, RTF, OpenReader, and plain text format. Direct reading from
tar, zip, gzip, and bzip2 archives is also supported. FBReader can perform
automatic library building, and automatic language and character encoding
detection is also supported. Other features include:
1. Automatically generated contents table
2. Embedded images support
3. Footnotes/hyperlinks support
4. Position indicator
5. Keeps the last open book and the last read positions for all
opened books between runs
Figure 9.17 OpenOffice email in Ubuntu MID.
Chap9.fm Page 250 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
Mobile Platform Virtualization 251
6. List of last opened books
7. Automatic hyphenation
8. Text search and full-screen mode, including screen rotation by
90, 180, and 270 degrees
An FBReader screen is shown in Figure 9.18.
For those more inclined to chat using instant messaging, a full-featured
IM client is provided, as illustrated in Figure 9.19.
If you cannot find anyone to chat with, you can always use the Internet
browser to visit your favorite web sites, listen to the radio, or watch videos
on YouTube, Hulu, etc. The browser is very capable, supporting the most
recent standards for a rich user interface. See Figure 9.20.
9.4 Mobile Platform Virtualization
Smart phones with rich and open operating systems are growing in popular-
ity, resulting in a market that is undergoing tremendous innovation and
change. The pressure to reduce development costs and get phones to market
faster has increased competitive pressure to deliver feature-rich phones to
market faster and to migrate from proprietary operating systems to open
operating systems without compromising the security of trusted services.
Figure 9.18 FBReader.
Chap9.fm Page 251 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
252 Cloud Computing
As mobile phones have become more powerful, beyond their basic
phone functionality, phones now offer music, video, cameras, and built-in
GPS capabilities. Rich applications are being built every day by a vibrant
developer community utilizing the open operating systems. As these capa-
bilities have been developed, the mobile phone user’s ability to include
applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank and credit card informa-
tion, and personal information management (PIM) have all been combined
to provide a much richer and more valuable experience into a persona that is
Figure 9.19 Ubuntu MID instant messenger.
Figure 9.20 Internet browsing on Ubuntu MID.
Chap9.fm Page 252 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
Mobile Platform Virtualization 253
portable and can be transferred seamlessly when upgrading to a new phone.
The ability to protect and migrate personas will become an important pur-
chasing decision. The risk of not securing and managing employee-owned
devices if they contain confidential information is significant, and managing
a wide variety of devices is complex in terms of both cost and security. Vir-
tualization is a key enabling technology to address these issues.
Security is a serious issue for mobile handsets running an open source
operating systems. There are already a significant number of known viruses,
and their numbers are growing fast for mobile phones but still lag far
behind the number of known PC viruses. The mobile handset user is a rov-
ing agent in a wireless IT world, and security is every bit as important as it is
in the fixed-wire IT world. The frequent emergency security upgrades and
patches common in the PC world, however, would be unacceptable to the
average user of a mobile handset. Such an approach to security could stall
the proliferation of smart and feature phones. Consequently, security must
be designed in from day one of the handset’s life cycle. Real-time virtualiza-
tion solutions offer robust security via hardware-enforced memory isolation
of partitions, isolating each operating system from the others and prevent-
ing cross-corruption. In addition, specific partitions may be added and used
to execute secure applications in small certifiable environments protected
from the larger open environment or real-time operating system (RTOS)
executing in other partitions. Security cannot be an afterthought.
A virtualization solution may be used to ease introduction of smart
phone software functionality to an existing feature phone hardware plat-
form, with minimal effort and cost. Virtualization-based solutions open up
the phone software architecture to bring added functionality to both feature
phones and smartphones in terms of service availability, security, and device
management. Two examples of virtualization software being used on smart-
phones are discussed in the following.
9.4.1 KVM
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is open source software that is a full
virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization
extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). KVM consists of a kernel module,
kvm.ko, which provides the core virtualization infrastructure, and a proces-
sor-specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko, depending on the CPU
manufacturer (Intel or AMD). KVM also requires a modified QEMU,
7
although work is underway to get the required changes upstream. Multiple
Chap9.fm Page 253 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
254 Cloud Computing
virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images can can be
run using KVM. . A wide variety of guest operating systems work with
KVM, including many versions of Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, Haiku,
ReactOS, and the AROS Research Operating System. Each virtual machine
has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.
The kernel component of KVM is included in Linux, as of the 2.6.20 ker-
nel version.
KVM’s performance is good, but not as good as that of some of the
more mature products, such as VMware or VirtualBox. For example, net-
work and graphics speeds are noticeably slower with KVM. In general,
KVM performance can offer near-native speed, thanks to its use of Intel VT
or AMD-V extensions. As an open source product, it is being very actively
developed and is constantly improving.
9.4.2 VMWare
VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) is a thin layer of software
that is embedded on a mobile phone to separate the applications and data
from the underlying hardware. It is optimized to run efficiently on low-
power, low-memory mobile phones. MVP is planned to enable handset
vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.
8
VMware inherited the MVP software when it bought Trango Virtual Pro-
cessors in October 2008. The technology serves much the same function as
VMware’s flagship server product, adding a flexible software layer onto
hardware and making it easier to move applications from device to device.
9
MVP currently supports a wide range of real-time and rich operating sys-
tems, including Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos,
µITRON NORTi, and µC/OS-II.
VMware MVP benefits end users by being able to run multiple profiles
(e.g., one for personal use and one for work use) on the same phone.
Increasingly, handset vendors and carriers are migrating from proprietary
operating systems to rich open operating systems so that their customers can
choose from the widest selection of applications. With this transition to
open operating systems, however, protection of trusted services such as digi-
7. According to Wikipedia, “QEMU is a processor emulator that relies on dynamic binary
translation to achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU archi-
tectures,” QEMU, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU, retrieved 9 Mar 2009.
8. http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/mvp.html.
9. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/vmware-lends-virtual-hand-to-mobile-phone-
crowd.
Chap9.fm Page 254 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.