On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 01:20:06PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
think in this day and age it is a bit silly to try and run a VM on a 32-bit hostWhy? 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.
Because the hardware features to permit efficient virtualization weren't available on i386-only CPUs. (And there's really no good reason to run a VM host [vs guest] in i386 mode if it can run in amd64 mode.)
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.
It's certainly possible to run software-only virtualization on an ancient CPU, but at that point (since it would clearly just be to scratch an itch, not for any practical reason) why ask for opinions instead of just playing around if playing around is the only goal?