The Mobile Personal-Computing Based On User-Level Virtuliziation

With the falling prices of hardware, personal computers can be used almost everywhere, but the user is always accustomed to their own configured desktop computing environment. Users may face problems such as repeated installation, duplicated configuration, fussy system management, when they are working on a computer that not belongs to themselves. Under such circumstances, mobile personal computing environment has become the urgent needs of users; it can not only effectively address problems above, but also be the development trend of desktop computing environment.This dissertation presents our research works on the user-level virtualization technology, and then introduces how to adopt this technology for the real implementation of personal portable computing environment, DesktopToGo, which realizes the mobility of personal computing environment.The main contributions of our works include:(1) Get the resources for the personal computing environment. This dissertation illustrates how to use snapshot comparison to get the resources for the virtual run-time environment, which contains virtual registry environment and virtual file environment.(2) Virtual registry environment. Virtual registry contains a private registry system similar to Windows registry, the method maintaining data coherence in use of RPC(Remote Procedure Call) , interception and redirection of Windows registry API ( Application Programming Interface) . (3) Virtual file system. This dissertation illustrates how we implement the virtual file system, which combines the Environment Variables and interception of windows file API. We also use Copy-on-Write to isolate file environment of different users.(4) Testing. This dissertation describes the way and result of testing. The result shows that we can use DesktopToGo to get our personal computing environment with nearly no affect on dependability and performance of applications.