[Arm-netbook] ARM's OOB para-virtualization & FreeZone in A10?

freebirds at fastmail.fm freebirds at fastmail.fm
Thu Jul 5 22:05:33 BST 2012


Gordon Bobic, I greatly appreciate your advice on firewall and snort. I
will follow through with it.

The Toshiba AC100 has ARM Cortex A9. Yesterday, I posted that Cortex A9
has FreeZone and ARM's virtualization extensions. Thus, I cannot buy it.
Yesterday, I asked on the ARM forum whether Cortex A8 has virtualization
extensions. See
http://forums.arm.com/index.php?/topic/16021-para-virtualization-in-cortex-a8/ 

Cortex A8 does not have some support for virtualization. Cortex A9 does,
so I am not going to buy it. I am still concerned about TrustZone in
Cortex A8. Their answers are:

All the Cortex-A processors (A5, A7, A8, A9 and A15) support TrustZone
(or the Security Extensions to given them the ARM ARM name)!

The Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 additionally support the Virtualization
extensions, making it much easier to do hardware/full virtualization.

The A9/A5 have some support for virtualization, but not as much. So
you'd have to go the software approach. The A8 (from memory) as no
specific virtualization support, so again you'd have to go the software
approach.

To answer the final part - ALL Cortex-A8 processors will AWLAYS support
TrustZone. That doesn't mean you have to use it. 

Para-virtualization is a software-only solution for virtualizing
operating system software. Almost any CPU can implement
para-virtualization ...

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different...




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