ArchLinux Arm with KVM/QEMU for Master Thesis

[bolke]

Hello guys,

I am pretty new to this stuff (embedded/linux).

For my Master Thesis I want to run a an armv8 guest on an armv8 (arm cortex a 53) host (raspberrry pi).
I hope to get better relative performance compared to running the arm guest on a x86 guest due to the hardware virtualization.

I am wondering which Linux I should install on my Raspberry as the Raspian does not support KVM (as far as I know).
I have trouble finding an answer to the question if aarchlinux for arm does support/enable kvm.
After using google, I found a few threads about running kvm on an arm host with opensuse or gentoo but a colleague told me about aarchlinux.
So, is it possible to enable KVM Virtualization with archlinux for arm on a arm host (raspberry pi 3b+)?

The next thing is,
I am planing to emulate a raspberry pi for development purposes on an x86-64 host and switch on the real hardware later on (mainly for benchmarking) to ease my development (we have powerful machines in my office: i am working on shared linux, centos with 48x3ghz and 258gb ram).

So is it possible to emulate an arm vm with qemu and running a linux on this arm guest wich uses kvm to virtualize another arm guest? so basically arm-on-arm-on-x86-64?

or should i just develop on the raspberry pi?

I hope my questions is properly placed!

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Jan

[WarheadsSE]

To be straight forward, why are you targeting platform with only 1 GB of RAM for virtual machines? Is KVM doable, yes. Will it provide any value? Will it be usable?

The only advantage you'll see in QEMU/KVM on a large x86_64 host is the reduction in IO subsystem throttling via the MMC/SD bus. Keep in mind: QEMU would be used with x86_64, this it would not be hardware virtualization. It would be hardware emulation.