Supporting multiple OSes with OS switching
Jun Sun, Dong Xiang Zhou, Steve Longerbeam · USENIX Annual Technical Conference · 2007
People increasingly put more than one OSes into their computers and devices like mobile phones. Multiboot and virtualization are two common technologies for this purpose. In this paper we promote a new approach called OS switching. With OS switching, multiple OSes timeshare the same computer cooperatively. A typical implementation can reuse an OS's suspend/resume functionality with little modification. The OS switching approach promises fast native execution speed with shorter switching time than traditional multi-boot approach. We describe the design of OS switching as well as our implementation with Linux and WinCE, and evaluate its performance.