Nested virtualization on Graviton

Thanks for your interest in Graviton instances!

Graviton 2 uses the ARMv8.2 architecture, which does not have native support for nested virtualization, which is added in ARMv8.3. See https://developer.arm.com/architectures/learn-the-architecture/aarch64-virtualization/nested-virtualization for more information. You can, however, use any of the Graviton metal instance types to do what you want to. AWS offers a metal instance with 64 Graviton 2 cores in the C, M, and R instances families.

Feel free to post again if you have follow up questions.

Jonathan

Edited by: JonathanForAWS on Oct 13, 2020 2:18 PM

Thanks Jonathan

That's a pretty awesome explaination. I did not know Graviton 2 was based ARMv8.2. Now I am very excited for Graviton 3 ;-).

I can't do what I want to do on bare-metal Graviton as I need to emulate an NVMe SSD with a CMB inside QEMU/libvirt to do some p2pdma Linux kernel testing for ARM platforms. The NVMe drives you emulate on these instances via Nitro don't support the CMB feature and the virtualization Nitro provides messes with the experiments I want to perform.

I did get emulated QEMU to work on the Graviton 2 but it is (as you might imagine) stupid slow. Using a real ARM CPU to run an emulation of a ARM CPU is not efficient ;-). I do have some real Arm based systems in my lab (based on Mellanox and Broadcom ARM SoCs) and will see if I can setup a bare-metal system with what I need on them.

Stephen