SoulPad - Carry your desktop in USB or iPod
There have been some articles posted over the past year or so about putting a bootable OS image onto USB for bringing along a personal desktop environment without the personal computer. This project at IBM research looks like they did a thorough job, putting not only the operating system and desktop applications on the USB storage, but also providing a mechanism for persisting the session state, i.e. you can “hibernate” your session back to the USB device.
Since the only requirement is that the storage device is both large enough for the system, and is a bootable device, a wide range of USB storage devices can be used, including MP3 players such as the iPod.
The PC boots an auto-configuring operating system from the SoulPad, starts a virtual machine monitor, and resumes a suspended virtual machine that has the user’s entire personal computing environment, which includes the user’s files, user’s operating system, installed applications, desktop configuration as well as all running applications and open windows. Essentially, SoulPad enables a user to hibernate a PC session to a pocket form-factor device and carry the device to some another PC and resume his session on that PC. SoulPad has minimal dependencies on PCs that can be used to resume a user session. In specific, PCs are neither required to be network connected, nor have any pre-installed software. The only requirement is the support of a high speed local connection to a SoulPad device for an acceptable suspend/resume times and acceptable runtime performance. Our approach differs from Internet Suspend/Resume in several ways: we do not require a known software stack on the PC and also do not rely on network connectivity to fetch suspended virtual machines. In our first prototype, we installed the SoulPad software stack on off-the-shelf hard disks with USB 2.0 interfaces
Doesn’t look like they’re distributing the bits at the moment. An attendee at a presentation on the SoulPad says that “IBM did state there are a number of software licensing issues”. Hope they find a way to make it available. And change the name.
In the meantime, I’ve been looking at simpler USB-based solutions such as Flash Linux (build your own), or Computer-on-a-Stick (buy prebuilt, $149, including the USB stick). I find I’m reluctant to use computers in public internet cafes for much other than general web surfing, so it’s hard to travel without a notebook. Something like this plus SSH and VPN would make using public hardware and network much more palatable.
Video clip (14MB, wmv)
Presentation on SoulPad at ACM MobiSys 2005
