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Wow, I didn't expect the Red Bend hypervisor. This seems like a total disaster from a security and privacy perspective. I really don't understand why this make

Wow, I didn't expect the Red Bend hypervisor. This seems like a total disaster from a security and privacy perspective. I really don't understand why this makes sense to do. What is so special and secret about the baseband that makes it worth the effort of running a hypervisor on such an underpowered phone?

rurounijones 11y ago
Well from the article it sounds like this means they don't need a separate cpu or ram to run the baseband software. less components = cheaper phone.
walterbell 11y ago
Israel-based Redbend claims to be the market leader (~70% share / 2B devices) in smartphone OTA updates (http://www.redbend.com/data/upl/whitepapers/from_hardware_manufacturer_to_service_provider_white_paper.pdf http://www.redbend.com/data/upl/whitepapers/from_hardware_ma...) and is expanding into automotive OTA updates, http://www.redbend.com/en/company/news-and-events/in-the-news/-1 http://www.redbend.com/en/company/news-and-events/in-the-new...
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Ugh, that marketing lingo...
hrrsn 11y ago
Lower manufacturing cost, I bet.
spitfire 11y ago
Cost and modularity. Even the cheapest baseband chip will add a significant cost to a phone. If they can get rid of the physical baseband processor they get a major cost savings. As for why user a hypervisor vs a user mode or kernel driver: Modularity. Some company can specialize in producing soft-basebands (software eats the world!) and ship a simple image blob that you can drop into your virtualization host, set it to use 5% of CPU time and you're away to the races. Might be able to bring up a baseband on a new platform inside a day.
sliverstorm 11y ago
This seems like a total disaster from a security and privacy perspective. (Not that a shanzhai manufacturer making a $34 phone cares in the slightest about those things)
cnvogel 11y ago
Also don't expect this "hypervisor" to be a complete software package like Xen or VMware. I'm speculating here, but all that's needed is a rather fixed allocation of peripherals, interrupts and RAM for each guest (radio+SIM+a few MB RAM to baseband, everything else to Android), likely compiled statically for this particular platform. No fancy emulation of hardware or device-drivers giving paravirtualized access to complicated peripherals necessary. In that case, and with a CPU and peripherals designed with keeping this concept in mind, the overhead will be almost non-existant compared to, for example, running the baseband functionality as a "regular kernel module"; with the added advantage of clearly separating both worlds, and isolating the realtime-requirements of the baseband from the Linux kernel. For some similar concept, have a loot at "RTlinux", where the Linux-Kernel runs as the lowest-priority task in a very thin realtime-OS to achieve guaranteed reaction times for, e.g. motor control applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux
cptskippy 11y ago
Aren't all (or most) baseband OSes real-time OSes? You can't really run a baseband with Linux. I imagine the virtualization software is there to run the baseband OS and the Android OS side by side on the same CPU.

rurounijones 11y ago

Well from the article it sounds like this means they don't need a separate cpu or ram to run the baseband software. less components = cheaper phone.

walterbell 11y ago

Israel-based Redbend claims to be the market leader (~70% share / 2B devices) in smartphone OTA updates (http://www.redbend.com/data/upl/whitepapers/from_hardware_manufacturer_to_service_provider_white_paper.pdf http://www.redbend.com/data/upl/whitepapers/from_hardware_ma...) and is expanding into automotive OTA updates, http://www.redbend.com/en/company/news-and-events/in-the-news/-1 http://www.redbend.com/en/company/news-and-events/in-the-new...

digi_owl 11y ago
Ugh, that marketing lingo...

hrrsn 11y ago

Lower manufacturing cost, I bet.

spitfire 11y ago

Cost and modularity. Even the cheapest baseband chip will add a significant cost to a phone. If they can get rid of the physical baseband processor they get a major cost savings. As for why user a hypervisor vs a user mode or kernel driver: Modularity. Some company can specialize in producing soft-basebands (software eats the world!) and ship a simple image blob that you can drop into your virtualization host, set it to use 5% of CPU time and you're away to the races. Might be able to bring up a baseband on a new platform inside a day.

sliverstorm 11y ago

This seems like a total disaster from a security and privacy perspective. (Not that a shanzhai manufacturer making a $34 phone cares in the slightest about those things)

cnvogel 11y ago

Also don't expect this "hypervisor" to be a complete software package like Xen or VMware. I'm speculating here, but all that's needed is a rather fixed allocation of peripherals, interrupts and RAM for each guest (radio+SIM+a few MB RAM to baseband, everything else to Android), likely compiled statically for this particular platform. No fancy emulation of hardware or device-drivers giving paravirtualized access to complicated peripherals necessary. In that case, and with a CPU and peripherals designed with keeping this concept in mind, the overhead will be almost non-existant compared to, for example, running the baseband functionality as a "regular kernel module"; with the added advantage of clearly separating both worlds, and isolating the realtime-requirements of the baseband from the Linux kernel. For some similar concept, have a loot at "RTlinux", where the Linux-Kernel runs as the lowest-priority task in a very thin realtime-OS to achieve guaranteed reaction times for, e.g. motor control applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux

cptskippy 11y ago

Aren't all (or most) baseband OSes real-time OSes? You can't really run a baseband with Linux. I imagine the virtualization software is there to run the baseband OS and the Android OS side by side on the same CPU.