Hi there!

I am using a 64bit Intel Core2 Duo processor to develop for a system with a 32bit Intel Atom processor.

I'm working inside a linux32 chroot with a userland compiled with -march=atom, this has been working fine for ages except now I have a program that is crashing with the message "Illegal Instruction". I suspect its because the program is compiled for a slightly different processor than the one its running on.

Is there a way to emulate an x86 processor on a x86_64 processor? Will qemu work for this or will it just try to execute the x86 code directly on the processor without emulation?

What OS are you running? You may simply need to install 32bit compatibility packages. If you actually need to emulate an x86 system, you would need to use something like VMWare, Xen, VirtualBox, etc.

Also, what Atom processor is this. I have an Atom processor and it's 64-bit compatible. Maybe yours is older, or maybe not.

I am nearly certain that is not the case.

I think your program simply has a bug in it.

Most likely, the bounds of a local array were exceeded, corrupting the return address on the stack. When the function containing that bug returns, the CPU starts executing instructions somewhere in memory that isn't an instruction.

You should start by using GDB to find out where the program is crashing.

Not correct. If the problem were lack of some 32bit package, the symptom would be very different.