The newest iteration of the wonderful machine designed by Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi 2, sports a Broadcom BCM2836 SoC, with four Cortex-A7 cores. The Cortex-A7, being the little brother Cortex-A15, features the ARM Virtualization Extensions, so both Xen and KVM based virtualization should work on it.
At this point, you probably are wondering why would someone want to use virtualization on a RPi2. In addition to the usual “because you can!” answer, there’s a pretty good reason for it. Imagine you want to use the RPi2 as a media center and, at the same time, you want to run some personal services (like ownCloud or Pydio) on it. Instead of polluting the media center image, you can run an isolate, secure, virtual machine for such purpose. And, using my VEXPRESS_KVM port, you can even provide those services running NetBSD! 馃槈
The first step towards being able to use virtualization on the Raspberry Pi 2, is finding a way to boot the kernel in HYP mode. Let’s see how can we do that.