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Re: Choice of VMs under i386 Stretch?



> I have an innate desire to help people, but more importantly I give
> people the benefit of the doubt. Besides I self-taught myself a few
> things along the way, so I consider it a win.

Yes, please (and please remind me of that as well when I fail to follow
it ;-)

>> Now, which one of you is going to tell him that running virtual
>> machines is a bit of a stretch on a 32-bit host?

Huh?  The only systems on which I have ever run virtual machines were
all 32bit Debian systems.  Now admittedly, I tend to count LXC as a VM,
so maybe this is imprecise, but even w.r.t actual VMs they've all
been 32bit.

> think in this day and age it is a bit silly to try and run a VM on a
> 32-bit host

Why?  Often the question is not "which hardware should I pick to run
this VM" but "what kinds of technology should I use to run this software
on this hardware".  When "this hardware" is 32bit, and a VM is needed
between the two, then that's that.

What might be silly is to think that this choice can't be the best one.

> (or for that matter, run a 32-bit host at all if your
> hardware supports 64-bit,

That's what I do on half of my machines, yes (the other half is a mix
of 32bit-only and 64bit-only systems).

> That said I do not believe that any existing i386 32-bit-only hardware
> that is still floating around even supports the virtual machine
> extensions necessary to run a true VM host.

I haven't use qemu on my 32bit only i686 machines recently, but I see no
reason why it wouldn't work any more.

> Containers like Docker?  Sure, those should still work,

Of course they do.  Just like `chroot` (of which they're basically an
extension) they require no special hardware support of any kind.


        Stefan


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