Design And Application Of Remote Boot In Muti-Operating System Of Smart Mobile Devices

Abstract:In recent years, with an increasing popularity, the mobile devices play a decisive role in the national economy. Though the technology has developed rapidly, the unavoidable shortcomings of mobile devices are still there:the storage capacity is so limited, massive applications are difficult to manage, and the low security and reliability of user data.Addressing to these problems, the transparent computing technology has been proposed as a new computing mode to provide users with various operating systems and applications through network, without carrying about where the system or applications exactly are and how they come. At present, the typical transparent computing mode has been applied to the PC with x86architecture. However, it cannot be directly applied to mobile devices, so that, this paper develops a multi-operating systems remote boot management system. In our system, the operating systems and applications are regarded as manageable resources that stored on a network server. All the resources are dynamically loaded to the local flash and executed on demand. The main contribution of this work can be summarized as follows.Based on the hardware architecture of mobile devices, we first analyze the storage mode and boot process of different operating systems. According to the characteristics of mobile devices, this paper studies the key technologies on the process of multiple operating systems storage and boot, loading wireless network driver, remote booting through wireless network. Based on these studies, we design a booting management system to manage multiple operating systems through wireless network connection.In addition, this paper presents the specific method of realizing the mentioned functions in the boot management system.As all the operation systems, applications and user data are regarded as manageable resources that stored in remote sever, the directory of the user data is regarded as a user ID, thus to realize user authentication and data direction. For the purpose of multi-operating system booting, the system allocate appropriate storage for several operating systems, and connect the bootcmd command with buttons on the device to choose the corresponding operating system and set the correct bootargs. Furthermore, the introduction of the virtual file system enables the wireless NIC driver module been loaded dynamically before the operating system start, thus to achieve the purpose that the mobile device can connect to the remote server via a wireless network connection. Hence, the file system on the remote server will be mounted to the mobile device, and then, the control permission will be delivered to the local machine, to finish the remote boot of operating system on mobile devices.In order to verify the feasibility of the proposed system, this paper presents an implementation on OK6410-B development board of the boot management system developed with C and Linux shell. Moreover, the effectiveness and practicality of this system are testified under the following experiments and analysis:test the network transfer rate of the operating system (Linux QT) booting process and the application running process. Test the latency of operating system booting (both Linux QT and Android), and analyze the relationships of all stages of the boot process and the time latency in both operating systems. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed boot manager system.