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FWIW 64-bit ARMv8 is clean as well, designed without all the weird baggage that came with the 26->32 legacy ARM architecture. More importantly, ARM had reduced the impedance mismatch with x64, making porting various kinds of software (including system and virt) to ARM64 a relatively trivial affair. IBM seemed to have taken a few cues from that, finally implementing similar MMU and MMU virt support in Power ISA 3.0 (Power9).

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This is a strange analysis. Aarch64 is very complex, and they screwed up virt the first time and are now working to fix it in ARMv8.1.

wat? v8.2 is out and soon in products, v8.3 has been announced. What do you consider to be very complex, if you throw away 32-bit support? What specifically do you consider to be "screwed up", beyond the virt hole with cntfrq_el0, which affects migration between different vendor implementations? The whole VHE affair is more about enabling specific design decisions made by the AArch64 Linux implementation, if that's what you're alluding to. Certainly an ARMv8 implementation without VHE is not broken, virtualization works just fine.

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