Mobile OS Virtualization
Even before VMWare acquires Trango, the French company specialized in mobile OS virtualization, I've heard some OEMs in talks with Trango for future Windows Mobile devices.
A picture is better than 1000 words. Here is a picture of Trango's virtual processor:
The hypervisor is the Virtual Machine Monitor. From Trango's website:
The TRANGO hypervisor is a virtualization layer that allows multiple Virtual Machines to run on a single Hardware platform. It is based on paravirtualization technology which requires that the guest OS be slightly modified. "Privileged" or kernel mode instructions in the OS that access hardware directly are modified to API calls to the hypervisor, or "hypercalls".
Para virtualization is the most appropriate virtualization technique for embedded applications as it allows the best real-time performance compared to emulation or full virtualization which impose considerable resource burdens on the system both from the standpoint of memory and CPU overhead.
This is like Microsoft's Hypervisor for desktop systems, as opposed to VMWare's. This solution can be used for enabling something that Windows Mobile does not support, for example, iMode for Japanese market, or maybe running Windows Mobile apps on iPhone, or the other way around?
