Does it do hardware virtualization,
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a7.php
apparently yes. which is pretty amazing.
OK. A bit of background about why I (keep) asking about this:
We're looking for a development platform on which people can do KVM, libvirt, virt-*, libguestfs, etc.
The criteria are basically:
cheap
available to purchase now in many countries
ordinary human beings can install Fedora & make KVM work
On the above 3 believe me I've been looking long and hard for a A15/A7 device that meets those specs that we can actively support in Fedora. I'm yet to find one!
The Samsung Chromebook is kinda the default now. It's not especially cheap, although not too expensive. However the main problem is that HYP mode is crippled out of the box, and enabling it can't be done by regular humans.
Agreed here.
I'm currently testing the ODROID-XU. Not with any success, it has to be said -- too much peculiar hardware, like uncommon HDMI connectors, homebrew eMMC, and incompatible UART -- I need to visit an electrical shop before I can find out why it's refusing to boot.
I've looked at the ODROID* devices on numerous occasions with the view of supporting them in Fedora but their upstreaming of their kernel patches is basically non existent or close to truly dreadful which makes it impossible for us to support well OOTB. Add to this the Exynos upstream support is not much better, I've been told by Linaro people that the support for Exynos multi platforms support will land upstream "soon" for way too long (going back to the 3.7 days) and I've basically given up hope and I strongly suggest not to bother with anything at all that's Exynos based.
I think I'm in a bit of a peculiar position because I care a lot more about having a serial port or a VGA port, than having a powerful GPU.
At the moment I believe the best bet for this sort of support will be the Allwinner SOCs (and I never thought I'd be typing that) and we'll work with Hans to ensure his remix is usable and that we support as much as possible upstream to make his life as easy as possible.
The best support for A15 we have at the moment is the Calxeda Midway devices but they're neither cheap nor widely available yet unfortunately.
Peter