Can you get virtual machines to run on 32-bit CPUs? As far as I know, there isn't a single 32-bit CPU in existence, with the exception of the later generation of Pentium 4's, that support virtual machines. By virtual machines, I mean that the guest OS is not running in a paravirutalization setup, and that there is separation between the host and guest OS via hardware.
Just wondering.
EDIT: wrote this original post very very very late at night...thanks for pointing out that "hypervisor" isn't something in hardware; re-edited for clarity.
Heavens yes. VMWare was doing this for years before AMD and Intel rolled out their virtualization enhancements at the CPU level. It just wasn't quite as efficient. It was 64-bit that really allowed virtualization to take off, as it removed the RAM ceiling.
I was running virtualized NetWare as early as 2001 in VMWare. Performance sucked hard since NetWare NOOPs instead of HALTs during idle, which was why the VM-Tools were a required thing as it intercepted the idle-loop NOOPs and translated them into HALTs. That way the single threaded CPUs we were running back then could actually allow the host OS to do stuff.
The Core Duo T2500 (Yonah) 32-bit CPU in my Thinkpad T60p notebook has Intel VT.
Well VMWare have been about for around 10 years, go I'm going to go with Yes. I remember running stuff on VMWare workstation and being amazed that you could actually make virtualisation work on a PC - I'd only seen it on mainframes up until that point and thought it wouldn't ever trickle down to the point where anyone on an average home computer could do it!
I've had VirtualBox running FreeBSD 7.2 or Windows 98 as guests on Ubuntu 9.04 as a host on an old PIII.
yes but not fullVM it will be paraVM
Answering the revised question, do any 32-bit CPUs support a hardware hypervisor.
No, and so far there are no x86_64 CPUs that support it either. The Intel VT-x and AMD-V extensions are not hypervisors, they just make the job of a software hypervisor much simpler. The closest we've come to a hardware hypervisor on the x86 platform is embedded ESX, which does it almost at the BIOS level. But that's still firmware, not hardware.
There are about three ways to run virtual machines (sorted from best performance to least):
As far as I know, you don't need Intel-VT or AMD-V with Binary Translation. VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V both support Binary Translation, but Xen doesn't.
If you want more information about how these things work, check out Wikipedia.
Absolutely Yes.