An operating system hot-switching method, applied to a mobile terminal running multiple operating systems, where the multiple operating systems include one foreground operating system and at least one background operating system, a current foreground operating system is a first operating system. The method includes obtaining an operating system switching instruction, where the operating system switching instruction includes an identifier of the second operating system and a switching identifier, releasing, according to the switching identifier, a hardware resource occupied by the first operating system, and switching the foreground operating system from the first operating system to the second operating system. Hence, the operating system hot-switching method ensures, to some extent, mutually exclusive access to and coordinated use of a hardware resource by multiple operating systems, thereby ensuring use reliability of the hardware resource after switching of an operating system.