MobiVMM

Abstract

Mobile phones have evolved into complex systems as they have more and more new applications built-in. As a result, they are less reliable and less secure than before. Virtual Machine Monitors (VMM) or hypervisors have been introduced to help the reliability and security of mobile phones but the existing research does not completely address three issues critical to mobile phones: real-time support, resource limitation, and power efficiency. In this paper we propose building a new VMM called MobiVMM for mobile phones to deal with these issues. MobiVMM enables real-time support using priority based scheduling and a pseudo-polling mechanism. Resource and power efficiency is achieved through light-weight design and implementation, highly customized guest operating systems, and a virtual hardware abstraction layer. We present our design considerations and report some preliminary experimental results based on the OMAP 2430 development platform.