[vbox-dev] 32-bit hosts

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Exactly, it's not supported. What you're observing is that today it
still works, but we're not making any promises that it'll stay this way.
If with the next 6.0 change the 32-bit host builds are failing it's just
how it is. We would ignore any requests to fix it.

5.2 still works (and we'll keep it working) on 32-bit hosts, until its
end of support in July 2020.

VirtualBox was available for 32-bit host OSes much longer than any other
popular virtualizer out there. However, everything has to end
eventually, and we decided that with the new major version the time has
come. Otherwise we'd feel obliged to support it until the end of support
of 6.x, which is in 4.5 years from now. It feels wrong to use modern
64-bit systems to run a 32-bit OS (except in a VM), and the last
widespread true 32-bit CPUs are getting rather old now.

The last mainstream 32-bit CPUs launched by Intel were in Q1/06, and the
very last 32-bit only Atom CPU was launched Q2/13. I doubt that Atom
CPUs are used much with VirtualBox (usually these are used in seriously
cheap stuff which doesn't have enough memory), so we're mainly talking
about systems made over a decade ago.

Klaus


On 15.05.2019 18:17, Sérgio Basto wrote:
> From [1] 
> but we build on Fedora RPMFusion vbox server (the host part) on i686,
> is not supported ? but is working ? ... 
> 
> Can someone explain better this sentence [1] ? 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> [1] 
> https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads 
>  "Please also use version 5.2 if you still need support for 32-bit
> hosts, as this has been discontinued in 6.0."