Are you feeling adventurous today? Good, so let’s give a try to some of the coolest upcoming technologies. podman is a tool for managing containers. If you’re familiar with docker, you’ll find it’s CLI quite similar. RHEL8 will include podman as part of the container-tools module. Kata Containers is an OCI Runtime which runs containerized processes inside a VM, using QEMU+KVM. This gives you the versatility of containers, with the isolation of a VM, among other nice features like static resource management and PCI passthru.

As I wrote on my previous post, Enabling HYP mode on the Raspberry Pi 2, the newest machine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation features a Cortex-A7 with Virtualization Extensions, but it isn’t possible to make use of such feature out of the box. In that article I showed that it was possible to start the kernel in HYP mode. Now, I’ll cover the rest of steps needed for enabling KVM virtualization and running your first guest OS.