Android migration in the fast lane

These challenges are daunting. But what if there were a way to greatly reduce the risk and time-to-market overhead associated with the migration task? And what if this could be done with increased flexibility in choice of target hardware design and product features to promote differentiation? With the enhanced mobile phone virtualization environment provided by the OKL4 microvisor, all this is possible.

Using the mobile phone virtualization approach instead of sacrificing legacy investments, device manufacturers and MNOs can migrate to Android with little or no migration cost for legacy code, such as existing application stacks. This allows key differentiating features of existing devices to be retained, while simultaneously reducing risk and development time.

This is not the only benefit of this approach. The typical hardware platform for an Android handset is a dual processor design, usually ARM9 + ARM11. A unique capability of a virtualized environment is that both single- and dual-processor designs are perfectly possible, giving the manufacturer a much greater choice of target silicon for a handset design and much more flexibility on price point.

The OKL4 microvisor has already achieved commercial success with such a virtualized single-core design: the recently launched Motorola Evoke QA4 device, heralded as the “best touch-screen from Motorola,” seamlessly integrating a Linux application environment, baseband stack, and several legacy applications, on a single-core ARM9. There is yet another advantage of virtualization when migrating to Android – once the design is virtualized, any subsequent port to a different hardware architecture – e.g. single- to dual-core, or even from dual- to single-core – is greatly simplified.

These are some big claims. To back them up, we’ll look at the OKL4 microvisor, show how Android works in a virtualized environment, explain how this simplifies the migration task, and describe some specific examples of its application.