OK:Symbian

The Symbian OS is the most widely deployed smartphone OS, with global deployment in hundreds of millions of smartphones. With the launch of the Symbian Foundation and the move to open-source development and distribution, the pace of Symbian OS adoption will likely continue.

Broad deployment by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and others in the Symbian ecosystem has not necessarily made it easier for device OEMs to bring Symbian devices to market. Semiconductor suppliers and device OEMs must still cope with basic board support issues, from accommodating ARM-based chipsets to building device drivers, as well as refactoring and tuning legacy-embedded and desktop code to run well on the platform.

OK:Symbian

In OK:Symbian, OK Labs supplies an OS Support Package for Symbian OS, enabled for use as a guest OS of the OKL4 mobile virtualization platform. OK:Symbian simplifies and streamlines the process of targeting new phone designs with a mobile OS.

OK:Symbian provides a standard Symbian OS environment, where existing Symbian applications can run without modification, and new applications can be developed using standard Symbian OS development tools.

Using OK:Symbian to create a virtual machine (VM) with a Symbian guest OS adds to the benefits associated with the use of Symbian OS in the following ways:

  • Symbian OS applications can run on the same processor side-by-side with legacy applications and legacy OSes. This concurrent support for two operating systems eliminates the need for either multiprocessor hardware or porting the legacy system to the Symbian OS.
  • Through Secure HyperCell™ Technology, OKL4 cells can complement the Symbian OS VM by providing an execution environment with better real-time properties and stronger security.
  • OKL4 cells are well-suited to hosting real-time OSes, easing implementation of latency-sensitive functions without sacrificing the rich ecosystem support available for Symbian OS.

Challenges to deploying Symbian OS

Symbian OS is large - Symbian is tens of millions of lines of source code distributed among many modules and picoservers. OKL4 cells make it easier to meet the security and certification requirements of key applications or subsystems by offering applications a much smaller trusted computing base than is possible for a Symbian OS environment.

Symbian OS is open - The complexity and openness of the Symbian OS can increase the risk of security exploits and reliability problems. Using the OKL4 microvisor, Symbian OS and its applications can run in isolation from other software subsystems, making it easier to offer higher levels of security and reliability to those subsystems without having to provide a dedicated hardware execution environment.

High stakes — device drivers

Device drivers represent a wildcard in mobile designs - difficult to develop, they can be harder to maintain and migrate forward. Drivers can also present openings for security exploits. OKL4 makes drivers a safer bet by:

  • Offering an innovative device-driver approach with high-performance, sharable, isolated, user-level device drivers for improved reliability and security.
  • Running device drivers at user level and limiting privileged code to the OKL4 Microvisor.
  • Supporting device drivers running in any guest OS.

The OKL4 Microvisor enables systems that are easier to develop, easier to maintain, more secure, and more reliable. The OKL4 building block approach combines, connects, and manages VMs, native OKL4 subsystems, and device drivers. OK:Symbian adds ready-to-use Symbian OS VMs to the standard set of building blocks available to developers.

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