Looking at the logs to find out why spi-dev wasn’t loading up on my instance of Raspbian for Robots, (Spoiler, it’s not supposed to), I found something interesting near the top of the dmesg log:
[ 0.003574] CPU: Testing write buffer coherency: ok
[ 0.004093] CPU0: thread -1, cpu 0, socket 0, mpidr 80000000
[ 0.005020] Setting up static identity map for 0x200000 - 0x20003c
[ 0.005243] rcu: Hierarchical SRCU implementation.
[ 0.005940] smp: Bringing up secondary CPUs ...
[ 0.007139] CPU1: thread -1, cpu 1, socket 0, mpidr 80000001
[ 0.008458] CPU2: thread -1, cpu 2, socket 0, mpidr 80000002
[ 0.009717] CPU3: thread -1, cpu 3, socket 0, mpidr 80000003
[ 0.009875] smp: Brought up 1 node, 4 CPUs
[ 0.009948] SMP: Total of 4 processors activated (432.00 BogoMIPS).
[ 0.009975] CPU: All CPU(s) started in HYP mode.
[ 0.009999] CPU: Virtualization extensions available.
Did you catch the last two lines?
[ 0.009975] CPU: All CPU(s) started in HYP mode.
[ 0.009999] CPU: Virtualization extensions available.
All four CPU’s (at least on my Pi-4), started in “HYPervisor” mode, (i.e. virtualization mode enabled), and this is confirmed by the next line stating that “Virtualization extensions available”
Interesting!
I’m not sure I’d be willing to run a full-up version of VM-Ware on my little Pi-4, but it’s interesting to know that the Pi can - at least at the hardware level - handle virtualization.
Hmmm. . . .
Maybe I can find out how to run GoPiGo O/S in a virtual machine inside Raspbian for Robots? Totally righteous and cool beanies!