Why does Virtualbox need Universal binaries?

Bradley Giesbrecht pixilla at macports.org
Wed May 15 16:32:54 PDT 2013


On May 15, 2013, at 1:40 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> 
> On May 15, 2013, at 15:38, John Ruschmeyer wrote:
> 
>> I decided to install Virtualbox via MacPorts as opposed to installing the binary from Oracle. What has happended, though, is that MacPorts has started recompiling dependencies with "+Universal" (currently on glib2).
>> 
>> What I don't understand is why this is necessary, particularly since Virtualbox will never run on anything other than an Intel-based system?
> 
> Virtualbox installs a kernel extension. So it needs to build for the same architecture as your kernel.
> 
> Your Mac is presumably one of the early Intel Macs that uses a 32-bit kernel, therefore Virtualbox builds itself 32-bit. In order to do that, MacPorts must first rebuild all of its dependencies universal (32-bit and 64-bit).

buildbot +universal would be nice


Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)



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