Why does Virtualbox need Universal binaries?

[Ryan Schmidt]

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).