An Operating System Architecture for Future Information Appliances

A software platform for developing future information appliances requires to satisfy various diverse requirements. The operating system architecture presented in this paper enhances the flexibility and dependability through virtualization techniques. The architecture allows a system to use multiple operating systems simultaneously, and to use multi-core processors in a flexible way. Also, dependability mechanisms in our architecture will avoid crashing or hanging a system as much as possible in order to improve the user experience when defects in the software are exposed. We present a brief overview of each component in the operating system architecture and some sample scenarios that illustrate the effectiveness of the architecture.