[lgeek]

I'm going to guess that by 'no virtualization ability', you probably mean no hardware acceleration for virtualization. That doesn't mean you can't have OS-level virtualization. In fact, I'm working on a hypervisor for BeagleBoard.

Plus, TrustZone has been hacked in the past to implement virtualization.

[yuhong]

The reason hardware support for virtualization is necessary on x86 is only because of some design decisions dating back to the 80286.

[smithian]

Can you elaborate?

[wmf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualizati...

[ajross]

Last I remember reading ARMv7 wasn't Popek/Goldberg valid. The Cortex-A15 is touted as adding this facility, no? Regardless, a 4G box is going to be a poor resource allocation environment for virtualized hosting, which is something closer to my point.

[lgeek]

Yes, not all ARMv7 instructions meet the Popek/Goldberg virtualization criteria. The project I'm working on uses dynamic binary translation to trap & interpret these instructions. This is how VMware works without virtualization extensions on x86.