Lightweight Display Virtualization For Mobile Devices

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a constant evolution of mobile systems, from hardware improvements such as multi-core CPUs and virtualization extensions, to a rise in software complexity, including application stores that are the home for millions of mobile applications. This enables and encourages the rising trend of mobile virtualization. In this paper we present an approach for providing lightweight and fast display virtualization for mobile devices, allowing multiple operating systems to share the same physical display screen. We describe a design that provides the means to perform efficient display virtualization, making use of the concept of overlays implemented in recent underlying mobile display subsystems. We demonstrate our approach on a dual Android setup: two operating systems running simultaneously on the same mobile device, using our display virtualization framework.