LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America

Mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, are increasingly ubiquitous, used for work, personal, and geographic mobility needs. Their usage model, one app at a time, differs from traditional computers, and can naturally extend to allow multiple virtual instances on a single physical device. However, hypervisors are unsuitable for the task, and containers are yet unready to isolate and multiplex the variety of logical drivers and physical peripherals of mobile devices. This talk will present the case for device-namespaces to virtualize and multiplex device drivers and provide context-awareness to benefit linux-containers and end-users. I will describe the design and details of device-namespaces, and give a live demo showing two virtual phones running simultaneously on one smartphone. I will then open the floor to discuss the device-namespaces and their adoption upstream.