Breaking free of kernel version requirements due to binary blobs from Qualcomm/Broadcom et. al.

Running under hypervisor is not that much of a performance issue really.

As for usability of Android or Native apps, I don't believe there would be any noticeable performance degradation.

there is such a thing like virtualization extensions in ARMV7-A in principle but there is most likely no way that this SoC implements it. @juiceme you will notice that you cannot even watch a video (in browser or somewhere else) if you have no access to qualcomm hardware codec in your guest, despite the loss of main memory that will slow down everything a lot...

Thanks for the clearup, @lpr.

Have you made some experiments with virtualization on armv7, or do you extrapolate that from experience on some other HW?

ARM describes the field of interest of these extensions (Cloud, robustness req. implementations, storage). In one sentence: large amount of main memory or very reduced but very robust application... The thing with hardware codec is not impossible to do but there isn't even vaapi/vdpau etc. in x86 guests, and the amount of RAM you need for guest kernel you could simply subtract from available RAM...

Sure, I would rather have that too, but we have wanted that for decades! What do we do until it happens?

Well, learning how these blobs works to do open source drivers will take too much time... sadly.

Virtualization is maybe some "temporary" idea but no the best, as @jollailija said.

Aside of that..., i know, i'm repeating myself but, we clearly need the source code.

If only Jolla had access to it...

A guest kernel can certainly have access to features that are not present in the hypervisor kernel. That is how you can run a Linux guest under a Windows hypervisor, for example. It's really the main point of virtualization...

Yea, that called software emulation. But it does not change the fact that the guest kernel will be run by the host one. Plus, emulation is slow on high-end servers, not to speak on a (probably crappy hw-wise) SFOS one.

No, software emulation is completely different. Emulators are programs that act the way some hardware does; for example performing the operations of a certain CPU, so that programs compiled for that CPU can be run in a different CPU. Virtualization is very different, you don't emulate any hardware at all, you only run an OS as an application under another OS. When virtualization was new (about a decade ago), there were significant performance hits, but with modern virtualization those problems are solved. Modern servers almost always run virtualized because it is actually faster than running unvirtualized (mainly because of parallelizing and better time-sharing of hardware).