Does anyone know if modern ARM designs include hardware virtualization extensions along the lines of vt-x and vt-d? It seems like a pure software virtualization approach along with full device emulation like vmware had to use in the dark days would be too heavy on a 1ghz/512mb platform. Maybe this is one of the drivers of the dual core arm adoption.
It's interesting that vmware is clear to say that they'd be guest agnostic - allowing whatever the user wanted to be emaulated. So while the use case here is android on android, I could see a real use for running a slimmed down but industry standard linux guest that could provide a standard dev/test environment for development. Sure the ui wouldn't be phone oriented, but plenty of LAMP installations run headless anyway. What other OS's have ARM support?
ARM's lower IPC and frequency may increase the time overhead of pure host-side virtualization or paravirtualization slower, but ARM is also a less convoluted architecture from a system software point of view, and may well have less state to virtualize, so the two may cancel each other out to some extent.
As for other operating systems with ARM support: iOS, several BSDs, RISC OS ( http://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads ), Haiku ( http://www.haiku-os.org/ ), and all manner of RTOS and other embedded operating systems. Oh, and Windows CE, Windows Embedded Standard, Windows Embedded for Point of Service, Windows Phone 7, etc.
It's interesting that vmware is clear to say that they'd be guest agnostic - allowing whatever the user wanted to be emaulated. So while the use case here is android on android, I could see a real use for running a slimmed down but industry standard linux guest that could provide a standard dev/test environment for development. Sure the ui wouldn't be phone oriented, but plenty of LAMP installations run headless anyway. What other OS's have ARM support?