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.

The newest iteration of the wonderful machine designed by Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi 2, sports a Broadcom BCM2836 SoC, with four Cortex-A7 cores. The Cortex-A7, being the little brother Cortex-A15, features the ARM Virtualization Extensions, so both Xen and KVM based virtualization should work on it. At this point, you probably are wondering why would someone want to use virtualization on a RPi2. In addition to the usual “because you can!