ADvisor: A Hypervisor for Displaying Images on a Desktop

There are various mechanisms for displaying images on desktops to attract users´ attention. These include pop-up window dialogs, banner images in Web browsers, and balloon-like taskbar notifications. However, these mechanisms have some limitations. First, these mechanisms depend on a particular OS or application. Second, the location of the display is restricted (e.g., Displayed only inside a Web browser window). In this study, we propose a display mechanism called Advisor. Advisor is a hyper visor that displays an image on a desktop when a guest OS or virtual machine satisfies a predefined condition. For example, when a data block that is transferred between a guest OS and an I/O device contains a certain keyword, Advisor displays the image associated with the keyword. It also displays images when receiving a request from a server through a network. Because Advisor runs between the system hardware and the OS, it is not tightly bound to a particular OS or application. Advisor was implemented by modifying Bit Visor and QEMU/KVM, and a performance comparison of the runtime overheads involved was made by means of experimental procedures.