[Arm-netbook] Ask him for Android DDK (Was: I Have An Possible Chance To Meet An ARM Senior Manager)

Gordan Bobic gordan at bobich.net
Sun Oct 7 15:49:28 BST 2012


On 10/07/2012 02:41 PM, luke.leighton wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Gordan Bobic<gordan at bobich.net>  wrote:
>> On 10/07/2012 12:43 PM, luke.leighton wrote:
>>
>>> i think, therefore, that efforts would be better spent running Android
>>> as a Virtual OS within kvm or other Virtual Machine, on CPUs that have
>>> virtual machine support (ARM Cortex A9 and above).
>>
>> That would be a truly awful solution. Full virtualization is
>> _expensive_.
>
>   right.  ok.  understood.  well, what about l4ka then instead?  i know
> of one company that's already done an L4 microkernel'd version of
> android.

I'd never heard of L4Ka before (only just googled it). I am not sure 
what advantage this is supposed to have over other microkernel based 
hypervisors such as Xen and ESX.

> the overhead of l4linux these days on CPUs with decent
> context switching is minimal.

I remain skeptical on that considering that the overheads on microkernel 
based hypervisors (Xen, ESX) are 21%+ on full fat x86 iron.

Seriously, though - what's wrong with doing away with virtualization and 
just using isolation instead, like on Vserver? I don't see the gain from 
using a hypervisor. What would that enable, and how likely is that to 
end up being used in a plausibly realistic scenario before this decade 
is up?

Gordan



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