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?
midrange.com
