download installed OS?

[asian1]

There is a research of modular Knoppix SFS from Japan.

http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/sfs/index-en.html

Other possibility: VMWare Player, Xen Virtual machine, LLVA.

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/ProjectsWithLLVM/

"In this project, we have taken our next logical steps in this effort by (1) porting the entire Linux kernel to LLVA, and (2) engineering an environment in which a kernel can be run directly from its LLVM bytecode representation -- essentially, a minimal, but complete, emulated computer system with LLVA as its native instruction set. The emulator we have invented, llva-emu, executes kernel code by translating programs "just-in-time" from the LLVM bytecode format to the processor's native instruction set."