Portable Desktop Applications Based on User-Level Virtualization

As computing is becoming increasingly ubiquitous today, it would be very attractive for common computer users to access same personalized desktop environment on any compatible PC anytime and anywhere. This paper presents such a solution for Windows systems based on user-level virtualization technologies. Namely, the user's data, applications and their configurations are stored on a portable USB device. At run-time, the portable desktop-applications on the device will run in a user-mode virtualization environment where some resource (registry, files/directories, environment variables, etc.) accessing APIs are intercepted and redirected to the portable device as necessary. User can access her personalized applications and data conveniently on any compatible computer, although they do not exist on local disk. This paper describes the whole design, technical details and performance evaluation, and presents a demo application. Compared with some existing solutions based on virtual machine technologies, this solution is more efficient in performance and storage capacity.