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The most widely deployed mobile virtualization solution
Data Sheets
Software Reuse
Benefits & Uses
Software reuse
Device OEMs continuously engineer new products and product lines. Over time, the ongoing mobile product life cycle leads to a rich evolutionary history of hardware and software technologies and configurations. Device development can lead to dead ends and result in reinvention of the same structures and components, over and over again, generation to generation.
The challenge to reuse lies in the investment required to port existing software to new platforms, discouraging reuse because often it is just easier to start over.
Taming software reuse with mobile virtualization
Using mobile virtualization, the OKL4 Microvisor offers developers a different approach to software reuse, requiring significantly less investment in porting to new hardware and new OSes, with higher returns. Using mobile virtualization to enable reuse extends benefits to chipset solution providers and independent software providers as well, resulting in savings across the mobile ecosystem. In fact, the OKL4 Microvisor enables the reuse of software over generations of device designs and across product lines in two specific ways:
Keep it in the box, and ship it
First, existing software components can be reused in new designs "as-is," together with the legacy host OS environments for which they were originally developed. In other words, an existing software component that was developed and tested in a specific legacy OS environment can be reused without modification alongside other software components developed for a different OS, with newer OS kernel revisions or with an entirely different OS.
A short path to building a better box
Second, as a microkernel-based embedded hypervisor, the OKL4 Microvisor offers device OEMs the option of deploying OKL4 native system software as well as code residing in virtual machines (VMs). The native OKL4 execution environment is well-suited to creating components for reuse in different system configurations from Day One. OKL4 native components exist in a lightweight execution environment designed to host system software or middleware, including multimedia frameworks and communication stacks. OKL4 native components use services provided directly by OKL4 and do not require a separate guest OS, enjoying the same isolation and security advantages of traditional VMs in an OKL4 environment. More importantly, the nature of the OKL4 Microvisor's native components makes them ideal for creating components with a higher level of independence from specific hardware and OS choices, facilitating reuse in different products and across product lines.
