This issue was posted as a GitHub issue, but I thought it might be worthwhile cross-posting in case anyone else runs into this trying Clear Linux in VirtualBox on older hardware…
quiescens writes -
TLDR for the benefit of people that ended here searching for the same problem:
VBoxManage setextradata “vm name here” VBoxInternal/CPUM/IsaExts/PCLMUL 1
As far as both sides of this argument:
VirtualBox probably doesn’t want to aggressively advertise newer host CPU features to guests because when it becomes necessary to move a VM to a CPU with a different featureset it can cause problems.
However, the interface (no GUI) and documentation of manually enabling something like this is very much lacking - I had to dig through the source code to find this one.
Even if VirtualBox doesn’t want to add PCLMUL to the default Linux config, they could probably consider adding “Clear Linux” as one of version variants and set the flag automatically when that option is chosen.
Clear Linux doesn’t want to hamstring their builds to support the lack of a 10 year old CPU flag, which is a reasonable objection.
In practice the PCLMUL instructions are supported (even without the above config change), Virtualbox is simply not advertising the support to the guest.
Its only the test that is failing (if you remove the flag after installing, it will continue to work) - admittedly that is Virtualbox’s fault but Clear Linux could probably do better here too, possibly offer a boot option that overrides these checks or updating the “Clear Linux OS on VirtualBox” documentation to include the command above.