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

[Gordan Bobic]

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_. Have a look here for my findings on that:

http://www.altechnative.net/2012/08/04/virtual-performance-part-1-vmware/

To summarize:

1) Fastest (or least slow, depending on how you want to look at it) 
hypervisor is Xen.

2) The penalty, with full hardware virtualization support on a task that 
is _purely_ CPU and memory I/O limited (no disk/network I/O at all), is 
21%, assuming you use the best performing hypervisor. It gets worse from 
there (see the figures in the article).

For something like what you are describing, the only sane option is 
using something like Linux Vserver (or LXC or OpenVZ, although Vserver 
has some unique advantages). Chroot type virtualization comes with 
negligible overheads, unlike a full fat hypervisor which would cause 
overheads very unlikely to be acceptable in the power/performance 
envelope that the ARM devices are targeting.

Gordan