A Virtual Window System for CE Devices Based on System Virtualization

Owing to the benefits of system virtualization, even CE devices have come to take advantage of the technology. However, due to the lack of windowing system which fits virtualization-based CE devices, it is not only inefficient but also difficult for end users to utilize the CE devices running multiple domains. In this paper we present an effective virtual window system for CE devices based on system virtualization. Our approach has three major advantages: (1) by modifying X window system, it provides shared windowing services between domains without dependency of a specific network protocol; (2) by providing a unified graphical user interface which integrates icons of all the applications from every domain, it frees users from remembering which applications are located in which domain and from doing tedious operations for application launching and installation; (3) it provides efficiency in terms of size (storage and memory) and performance to CE devices. We have implemented a prototype of the virtual window system on the basis of Secure Xen on ARM. Our evaluation shows that our approach is usable and efficient enough to be practically adopted for CE devices based on system virtualization.