Hm. The latest 32bit Krypton LiveCD (based on Tumbleweed) with kernel 4.8.4-pae boots fine on this host and also as guest in vmware, but "crashes" (i.e. reboots immediately after the kernel/inintrd is loaded) when running inside VirtualBox (all on the same host). So it may indeed be BIOS specific indeed or certain hardware other than the CPU...