Some time ago, ARM Holdings presented the new virtualization extensions for its processor architecture, which are now present on some models of the Cortex family, like the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15. Though it’s a quite recent technology, both KVM and Xen hypervisors already support such extensions, allowing to run virtualized Guests in the same way you can already do on x86.
It’s true that current SoCs (System-on-Chip) and development boards doesn’t provide a number of cores and RAM memory that invite to run a significant number of Guests on them, but these are the first steps towards stabilization of ARM virtualization, paving the way for the future server-oriented ARM processors. On the other hand, this is also an interesting option for running alternative operating systems (like the *BSD family) on ARM hardware, without dealing with the extremely heterogeneous nature of it.
In this guide, where going to see how you can enable KVM virtualization on the Olinuxino-A20-MICRO development board.
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