liberasurecode | A Rust wrapper for openstack/liberasurecode | GPU library

I recently ran into a bug where a python library used a certain CPU instruction which existed on one x86 processor but not on another, resulting in an unexpected crash of the program (Illegal instruction) on one system but not on another. That had me thinking of the benefits of containerization to create a well-defined run-time environment for my software. But my brain ground to a halt when I realized how low level this is, and I could not figure out from reasoning nor from reading on the internet, as to what level the isolation of software like docker goes.

So my questions is: Would a containerization software, like Docker or LXC, be able to emulate an instruction which does not exist on the physical hardware? And would a full VM be able to deal with it, if a container could not?

Thought I'd fill in the blanks, just because people were curious.

The specific scenario I was caught by was when trying to apply Reed-Solomon erasure coding to a data object. I'm using the PyECLib library which implements Vandermonde Reed-Solomon via the liberasurecode library (which in turn uses jerasure, I believe).

This piece of code runs without errors on a compatible processor, but produces the Illegal instruction exception on some older processors: