Kelvyn Taylor

It never ceases to amaze me how new ideas, ­ like cicadas, can appear, breed, hibernate for a few years and then re-emerge in a metamorphosed form. Several years back, I remember meeting some guys from Phoenix Technologies, one of the major developers of PC firmware, who showed me one such idea whose rebirth is well overdue.

Back then, they showed me a laptop with a new type of Bios running something called FirstWare, which gave you an OS-independent, pre-boot environment in which applications like a browser, email client and diagnostic and recovery tools could run.
The idea was that this environment could be used as an emergency backup if the laptop wouldn’t boot into its normal operating system.

The whole thing relied on a protected area on the hard drive, the host protected area (HPA), where the custom applications were securely stored. System vendors could put a restore image in this area for example, while backups of user data could also be stored there.

Phoenix has just launched the logical successor to this technology, known collectively as PC 3.0, and, in keeping with the modern zeitgeist, it’s based on virtualisation.

I’m a great fan of anything that improves life for users and makes life easier for IT departments, and in this case I think Phoenix, with a bit of luck and a fair wind, could be onto a winner.

Two key components of PC 3.0 are Hypercore, a bare-metal hypervisor built into the Bios, and Hyperspace, a small Linux-based embedded operating system that can run entirely from Flash memory and is able to contain hardened applications for tasks such as media playback, web browsing and email. Hypercore also allows vendors to embed their own virtualised operating systems, all of which can run simultaneously alongside Windows while being totally isolated from it.

You can switch instantly and seamlessly back and forth between Windows and Hyperspace via a combination of hotkeys, or run Hyperspace without booting up Windows. The idea is that by including core applications in the AppSpace module of Hyperspace, then users can still be productive even if the laptop won’t boot. An advantage is that these virtual machines have full access to the hardware, so, for example, network and 3D graphics capabilities can be made available.

It’s a neat idea that offers notebook vendors an effective way to differentiate what are rapidly becoming commodity products. Of course, with a web-based office suite, email and a Wi-Fi connection all bundled in Hyperspace, the obvious question might then be “Why do we need Windows as well?”

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