IP Isolation

The integration challenge

To go to market as quickly as possible, device OEMs, platform providers, and mobile network operators (MNOs) work to integrate software from a variety of sources, both internal and external. The varied provenance of mobile software accompanies a range of terms of use and licenses, both proprietary and open source. In some situations, incompatible licensing and disclosure requirements can limit or complicate deployment of both existing software and newly created integrations built from it.

IP Isolation

IP Isolation

One expensive solution to this integration challenge is to isolate problematic stacks on their own CPUs. More cost-effective and practical is the OKL4 approach of using virtualization to enable integration and execution of software on one or more virtual CPUs. With OKL4 mobile virtualization, applications, middleware, drivers, and even entire OSes with incompatible licensing or other conflicting IP requirements can be run on a single physical processor and still comply with divergent licensing requirements. OKL4 accomplishes this feat with strict address space isolation among software components running in user space, with only OKL4 infrastructure executing as privileged code.

The OK Labs approach to IP integration echoes industry-standard practice in enterprise computing, where a single blade or workstation can seamlessly and benignly host instances of Windows Mobile, Linux, BSD, and even MacOS. In further analogy to enterprise computing, embedded virtualization enables selective integration and isolation to meet company-internal IP requirements without needing to redesign and increase BOM with additional CPUs.