In November 2008 VMware acquired the mobile virtualization startup Trango. Just a couple of months later Citrix invested in one of the biggest Trango competitors: Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs). In October last year virtualization.info reported that Citrix and Open Kernel Labs were working on Windows virtualization for smartphones and in December VMware announced a partnership with LG to deliver it’s Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) on Android, which it also showed of at the Mobile World Congress two weeks ago. While the MVP platform adopts a hosted virtualization platform (a type-2 VMM) which runs on top of the native RTOS installed on the phone, the Open Kernel Labs is a type-1 hypervisor running directly on the hardware and Open Kernel Labs is criticizing VMware for its decision to use a hosted virtualization platform.
Now Open Kernel Labs has announced the availability of SecureIT Mobile Enterprise. SecureIT Mobile Enterprise consists of the Secure HyperCell technology, which contains the OKL4 Microvisor, a hypervisor which runs on top of ARM processors, and also MIPS and Intel processor architectures, the website states. On top of the Microvisor different OS Support packages can run.
Open Kernel Labs now provides the following OS Support Packages:
Of course in order for these OS Support Packages to work, drivers need to be written to make the OS work, based on that we can see support for the different flavors of Linux, Android, Symbian and Windows, the website of Open Kernel Labs doesn’t give any specification yet on supported solutions although it has a video on its website showing the solution running on top of a Motorola device.
It’s interesting to note that LG, who is working with VMware on the MVP platform is also listed as a partner on the website of Open Kernel Labs, besides LG also ST-Ericsson, Motorola, MDS Technology, HTC, Qualcomm, Toshiba, OpenMoka, Montavista and ARM and is backed by Citrix, Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC), Fluffy Spider Technologies and Nicta.