SoulPad is a

mobile computing Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware ...

project developed by researchers at IBM. The project's aim is to provide a computer user with the ability to suspend their

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

and resume it on another computer using a USB

data storage device Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are cons ...

. The SoulPad project is the subject of a paper entitled ''Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads'', which won Best Paper at the 2005 ACM/ USENIX MobiSys conference. A demo video of the technology in action was made available on IBM's website. The researchers of the project have suggested that SoulPad could be used to boot one's operating environment from USB compatible storage devices such as cell phones and

iPod The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes ...

s (the latter being used in the video demo of the project). The name SoulPad is derived from the project's aim to separate the underlying computer hardware (the "body" of the computer) from the user's operating environment (the "soul" of the computer). The "Pad" part is most likely a reference to IBM's former

ThinkPad ThinkPad is a line of business-oriented laptop computers and tablets designed, developed and marketed by Lenovo, and formerly by IBM until 2005, when IBM's PC business was acquired by Lenovo. ThinkPads have a distinct black, boxy design la ...

line of laptop computers.

Usage

To use SoulPad, the user first suspends the state of their operating environment to the USB storage device. The user then takes their USB storage device, connects it to another computer and boots from the device. The user's operating environment is then restored to its running state from when it was first suspended; all applications and services are resumed as if the operating environment had not ceased operation.

Implementation

The implementation of the technology is outlined in the SoulPad software stack, which is a model for the project's layers of

abstraction Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or " concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An a ...

. SoulPad utilizes the Live

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

distribution

Knoppix KNOPPIX ( ) is an operating system based on Debian designed to be run directly from a CD / DVD (Live CD) or a USB flash drive (Live USB), one of the first live operating system distributions (just after Yggdrasil Linux). Knoppix was developed ...

as the "host" operating system; the computer system boots to Knoppix to recognize any devices the system has attached to it. The host then runs the

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

, which resumes the user's last session in their operating system.

Issues

Issues addressed in the paper include the large amount of resources necessary to use SoulPad. In addition, the paper mentions the large amount of time it takes to resume from Soulpad (around two minutes), contrasted with the small amount of time it takes to suspend the operating environment. This is attributed to the need for Knoppix to recognize all the devices attached to the current machine. A solution suggested to correct this problem is to provide the user with a set of system profiles to choose from. Security concerns regarding access to the local disk on the temporary computer have also been raised.

References

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External links

*{{Commonscatinline Input/output Mobile software IBM software