Xen hypervisor ported to ARM chips
20.05.12
The software is being demonstrated on schizophones that have a primary personality running in the host Android environment and a guest phone personality in the guest Android image running inside MVP.
MVP is not open source, and while Trango started out creating a bare-metal hypervisor for ARM devices, VMware backed off to type two because it was too difficult to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the mobile chip market - in terms of certifying for new chips and other peripherals as they become available from the legions of phone makers. Such certifications would slow down product introductions and eat into profits; it is much easier to let Android itself talk to these new chips and devices and have MVP present the same old virtual machine to the hosted Android apps.
A few weeks ago, Stefano Stabellini, a senior software engineer from Citrix Systems, and compatriots Tim Deegan and Ian Campbell, started hacking together a proof-of-concept Xen hypervisor for ARM machines, and on Tuersday Stabellini announced on the Linux Kernel Mailing List that they have put together a Xen hypervisor port to ARM's Cortex-A15 reference chip. ARM Holdings, the company behind the ARM architecture, gave the Xen-on-ARM project an emulation board to do their development and testing.
Source: Register