VIRTUALIZED MOBILE DEVICES

• US 20100333088A1
• Filed: 06/26/2009
• Published: 12/30/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 06/26/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Vmware LLC (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: VMware, Inc. (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: ROGEL, Lawrence S., Devine, Scott W.
• Granted Patent: US 8,302,094 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45533 Hypervisors; Virtual machine monitors

Abstract

One embodiment is a virtualized mobile device including virtualization software that supports one or more virtual machines and further includes: (a) device emulation software that communicates with device driver software in the one or more virtual machines; (b) device driver software that communicates with one or more physical devices of the mobile device; and (c) transformer stack software that interacts with the device emulation software and the device driver software.

Claims

1. In a virtualized mobile device comprised of virtualization software that supports one or more virtual machines, the virtualized mobile device comprising:

device emulation software that communicates with device driver software in the one or more virtual machines;

device driver software that communicates with one or more physical devices of the mobile device; and

transformer stack software that interacts with the device emulation software and the device driver software.

2. The virtualized mobile device of claim 1 wherein the transformer stack software communicates data and control information.

3. The virtualized mobile device of claim 2 wherein:

the transformer stack software comprises one or more software transformers.

4. The virtualized mobile device of claim 3 wherein:

one or more of the one or more of the software transformers are bi-directional in that data and control information can flow in a first and a second direction.

5. The virtualized mobile device of claim 3 wherein one or more of the software transformers comprise function pointers that indicate a software transformer in a path of data and control information flow.

6. The virtualized mobile device of claim 3 wherein one or more of the software transformers comprise a multiplexor comprised of a multiplicity of function pointers for a path through the transformer in a first direction.

7. The virtualized mobile device of claim 3 wherein one or more of the software transformers comprise a demultiplexor comprised of a multiplicity of function pointers for a path through the transformer in a second direction.

8. The virtualized mobile device of claim 3 wherein one or more of the software transformers comprise a filter.

9. The virtualized mobile device of claim 3 wherein the virtualization software comprises a management client that communicates with one or more of the software transformers of the transformer stack software.

10. The virtualized mobile device of claim 3 wherein the management client communicates control information to one or more of the one or more software transformers, which control information effects the functionality of the transformer.

11. The virtualized mobile device of claim 10 wherein a server communicates with the management client through one of the physical devices of the mobile device.

12. The virtualized mobile device of claim 1 wherein the device emulator further communicates with the device driver software.

13. The virtualized mobile device of claim 10 wherein a server communicates with one of the one or more virtual machines.