Does the Raspberry Pi 2 support hardware virtualization? Looking at the ARM specification page, the Cortex A7 chip has the ability to do so, but I'm unsure if there may be other problematic concerns with the SOC or Raspbian itself.
My end goal is to be able to create a very simple image that can be run on the RPi for learning Kernel development.
Xen definitely supports the ARM7/8, but they do not list the RPi in their supported hardware. There are lots of virtualization-related libraries in raspbian jessie, but they all seem to be about managing other platforms, not managing a hypervisor running on the Pi. It could be that the particular flavor of the ARM core used on the SoC is missing some functionality (mmu, iommu, etc.) that would allow you to run a hypervisor on it. Also note that the Pi3 has an ARM8 core -- if you set out on such a journey, better start with that. It's only $39.
If you know enough to write your own kernel, you should be able to write some test code to figure this out, no? :)
(If you do, please let us know!)
Good luck,
/ji
It looks like the Raspberry Pi does not currently support virtualization. The output of /proc/cpuinfo doesn't display any of the standard virtualization flags for either Linux nor ARM.
While you can technically enable KVM in the kernel, the SOC doesn't handle interrupts well. The closest thing to true virtualization you can get is to disable a core on the host, and dedicate it to the "virtual" guest.
The Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 do support hardware virtualization via KVM or Xvisor (a type-1 hypervisor) .
Furthermore , Docker is officially supported , even on the RPi1 and Zero. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/docker-comes-to-raspberry-pi/
