AVX2 issues

[hold_the_reins]

I've been struggling to use scipy on VMs in VirtualBox because it requires AVX/AVX2 support. When I run a very basic scipy.optimize.leastsq() routine, I get an error: "

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Illegal Instruction (core dumped)

". I believe I've traced this to an AVX/AVX2 issue. My host is a Windows 10 with an Intel Core i7-6500U CPU. I've tried both Fedora 26 32-bit and Ubuntu 16 32-bit guests and both get the same error. In both, running

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grep flags /proc/cpuinfo

shows that avx and avx2 are not enabled. I tried enabling them from the host command prompt with

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VBoxManage.exe setextradata "$VMname" VBoxInternal/CPUM/IsaExts/AVX2 1

, as was suggested in an askubuntu post that I can't link to because I'm a new member. The variable changes, as confirmed by

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getextradata enumerate

, but in both VMs, the list of flags in

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/proc/cpuinfo

does not change. My question is: is this the right VBoxManage key to be setting, or is there another key I should try? If it's the right key, why is it not enabling AVX2 in the guests flags?

Somewhat separately, is there a way to disable the need for AVX/AVX2 support from scipy? I understand this may be a little off-topic, and not suitable for this community, but if anyone has solved this previously, that would solve my problem.

[mpack]

There have been previous discussions of this issue, e.g. here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=84213.

If you need to continue this discussion then please provide a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in the GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.