Fast Operating System Switcher for mobile CE devices

Abstract

This paper proposes a fast Operating System (OS) Switcher for ARM-based Consumer Electronics (CE) such as Smart Phones, Tablets and IPTVs. The OS switcher enables users to utilize multiple OSes on single H/W device without security problem from interference among OSes. The OS switcher is notably faster than the multi-boot approach and can preserve the previous working states. The OS switcher does not burden any run time overhead compared to virtualization and can be easily applied to the new product. We implemented the OS switcher in the bootloader layer without any modification of OS.