Booting a FreeBSD 5.4 amd64 kernel on root filesystem populated with i386 binaries

Matthew D. Fuller fullermd at over-yonder.net
Tue Aug 9 12:48:00 GMT 2005


On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 01:13:54PM -0700 I heard the voice of
Brooks Davis, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> I'm pretty sure it's not supported under 5.x.  The i386 support just
> isn't good enough.  I'm not sure about 6.x.  Support is supposed to
> be a lot better there, but I don't recall any word of people testing
> this so at that point I suspect not.  I would suspect a jailed root
> will work before a real root file system does.

When I did a i386->amd64 conversion (because amd64 had no boot
floppies  *pout*), I temporarily hijacked my swap partition as a new
temporary root.  DESTDIR'd installworld, reboot, fiddle around in the
loader to boot off the new partition, then do another DESTDIR
installworld onto the real root and it was done.

I couldn't get the i386 world to load right with the amd64 kernel; it
seemed to bomb right around firing up init.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.


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