part of my phd dissertation was process migration for the desktop. I argued that MSFT or apple should make low powered portable devices (say phones/tablets) that were your computer, but could also be docked to more powerful computers. When docked, processes migrate off and run on the powerful hardware, when you want to undock, they migrate back.
when docked, the running gui apps switch to a keyboard/mouse optimized mode, and when undocked, they switched to a touch optimized mode.
I thought microsoft might have been heading in this direction with Windows 8 and the RT style apps, but instead of seeing it through they got gun shy and went back to more traditional style.
I did this back in 2013 I think. I had a desktop and a laptop that both supported IOMMU device passthrough. I used the Xen hypervisor at the time, and had a VM that I could migrate and then hotplug all the PCI devices to between the systems.
I never got it past the "playing around with it stage," but I was just _so_ sure that the market was going to move that way... Imagine your phone and laptop just migrates out to the cloud every time you lock it, then live-migrates back in when you wake it up... Or at least between your tiny laptop and your beefy desktop. Because nobody would have just one computer!
It sure sounds cool to me, but the reality is that it's too clunky. Virtualization and live migration are absurd solutions to consumer-level problems.
Surface Book was a step in this direction. The base of the computer had a discrete MVidia GPU, so you could run heavy GPU loads from the tablet section of the computer while connected to the base. If the base was removed, only the onboard Intel GPU was available.
when docked, the running gui apps switch to a keyboard/mouse optimized mode, and when undocked, they switched to a touch optimized mode.
I thought microsoft might have been heading in this direction with Windows 8 and the RT style apps, but instead of seeing it through they got gun shy and went back to more traditional style.