On Mar 18, 2010, at 9:50 PM, Bayard Bell wrote:

> As best as I can work out, VirtualBox on Leopard could run 64-bit VM 
> processes to increase the amount of resources available to a VM (this isn't 
> required to allow the VM to run a 64-bit OS, but the 64-bit OS isn't going to 
> have a whole lot of resources available to it if the VM has to run under 
> 32-bit process constraints).

We cannot run the VirtualBox process as 64-bit if the kernel is 32-bit.  The 
VirtualBox VM process has to use the same number of bits for pointers as the 
kernel does.  This is mainly because we are sharing data structures between 
kernel space, but also because lots of code simply assumes that the bit counts 
match (like R3R0PTRTYPE and all its users). I fear the code will not benefit 
from trying to address these issues (#ifdef orgy, structure alignment hell, 
etc.), otherwise we would probably have looked into it by now.

If you want to run a 64-bit VirtualBox on OS X, I suggest you run Snow Leopard 
with the 64-bit kernel.

--

Kind regards / Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Vennlig hilsen,
  Knut

--

Sun Microsystems GmbH        Knut St. Osmundsen
Werkstrasse 24               Senior Staff Engineer, VirtualBox
71384 Weinstadt, Germany     mailto:[email protected]

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