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To get to my idea: Think Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart could go to a firm in China and say "We will buy 500,000 devices over 2 years that do what a PC does, with no software. It has to all be in the hardware. Flash cards will be the memory method. The target selling price for the device will be under $200 for the device. There will be *no* moving parts." Could it happen with today's technology?


Pete Helgren wrote:
I am probably not communicating well.
You are close, but the manufacturer in China would only have to worry about either:

1. Building a PC that supported an given hypervisor (lets say VMWare)
or
2. Building their own hypervisor layer that is either written to a standard hypervisor API or they publish the hypervisor API so others can write a VM that would run on top of it.

The actual software that would run ON the hypervisor wouldn't necessarily be the responsibility of the PC Manufacturer unless they wrote their own hypervisor. I guess they could write this application software and they *could* provide a ROM based version of it. But the closest thing to a ROM based application might be the hypervisor itself. The hypervisor *could* be firmware but it also could be loaded during a network boot of the PC itself. This would be trivial.

Right now, a company like VMware writes a hypervisor that supports a given OS (if I understand correctly). Therefore there is VMWare for Windows, VMWare for Linux. It actually is tied to CPU architecture as well (x86 e.g. no support for running VMWare on Linux PPC). This "Host" can then run a "Guest" OS within that VM. VMWare supports many Windows and Linux guest OS's. What I am talking about would be something like this:

VMWare writes a hypervisor that is specific for a hardware architecture, period. They don't are about the OS, just the hardware. So, VMWare has this x86 hypervisor that will run as long as the hardware is compatible. Our manufacturer in China is only concerned about meeting the requirements of the hypervisor. Thats it. So as long as China PC, Inc. has a VMWare hypervisor compatible PC, they are OK.

"But wait" you may say, "what can I run on this thing?" Well, perhaps our friends at Open Office invests in the time and effort to learn to write to the VMWare hypervisor API's and creates an integrated Office Suite that runs on that hypervisor. THEY write the code to the VMWare hypervisor spec and the PC manufacturer also creates hardware that supports the VMWare hypervisor and the Open Office runs on the VMWare hypervisor running on the China PC, Inc's PC. Even better: IBM then says "Hey, we already have a hypervisor that runs on the i5 hardware. We'll publish that spec and help folks write applications to that standard". In that case, again the Open Office folks go ahead and port their VMWare hypervisor code to run on the IBM i5 hypervisor and, Voila, we now have OO running native on the i5 hypervisor.

Now, I am not saying that architecturally this is possible. Or, that writing a GUI application to the i5 hypervisor would be trivial. However, we have Linux running on a VM on the i5 hypervisor so I guess anything is possible.

The point is, the hypervisor virtualizes the hardware so that any application, be it a single app or a guest OS, can run on the hypervisor. The PC manufacture only worries about having "hypervisor compatible" hardware, they don't necessarily write apps specific to the hardware or any apps at all. They leave that task to the developer community.

Pete

Booth Martin wrote:
So, if I am understanding this rightly, a hardware firm in China, say, could make a device with a socket, or two, or three, and manufacture a chip to fit the socket that would have a few modest applications that ran quickly & well? Say, Open Office and Mozilla? There would also be a VM that could run Client Access, Adobe, and Paint Shop Pro, for instance?





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