Virtual Machines & Binary Compatibilty

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 31, 2019, at 14:13, Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:

> Q : Will this scenario work ?!?
> 
> If i create a VM of 10.6.8 in VirtualBox on my 2012 MacPro w/ Xeon CPUs,
> can I then rsync my macports installation to a Core 2 Duo based Mac Mini
> without any problems ?!?

Some ports may detect optional CPU capabilities, and build themselves to use those capabilities. Such a port might not work on earlier CPUs. But we would consider that to be a bug in the portfile: we would want such optional CPU capabilities only to be enabled if the user selects a nondefault variant of the port (such as the +perf variant of gdal).

The buildbot virtual machines run under VMware ESXi on 2009 Xserve hardware, which has Xeon CPUs. If that were a problem for any users with Core / Core 2 / Core 2 Duo CPUs, we'd probably have found out by now.