Running Multiple Androids on One ARM Platform

Abstract

Smartphones are widely used nowadays. Many users want to separate work and personal use of smartphones for security and privacy consideration, but it is very inconvenient to carry multiple smartphones. Multi-boot and virtualization are two existing techniques used to solve this problem. In this paper, we present a prototype on which multiple Android instances can time-share one ARM platform by using suspend and resume mechanism. We describe the design and implementation of our prototype and evaluate its performance. The performance result shows that our implementation imposes negligible time overhead, and the switching speed is much faster than the multi-boot approach. We also avoid a huge number of modified code lines, considerable memory occupation and significant performance penalty of the virtualization solution.