Cloning Computing Device Containers

Abstract

An operating system running on a computing device, also referred to herein as a host device, uses containers for hardware resource partitioning. A container can include one or more of various different components, such as a base operating system, a user-mode environment, an application, virtual devices, combinations thereof, and so forth. One or more container templates are maintained for a computing device, and in response to a request to create a new container, a template container is copied into memory of the computing device to create the new container. The template container includes the various components of the container, and these components are copied into memory of the computing device rather than being launched or started one after the other. Thus, time need not be expended starting the various components included in the container—the components are just copied into memory as a new container.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.