Stupid Question

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2006-Apr-01 13:48:48 -0700, Cartoon Factory wrote:
>I have a stupid question.

No such thing as stupid questions but this does belong on -questions rather
then -arch.

> I am looking at the processors supported by
>FreeBSD, and I see AMD64 (which I know is AMD) and ia64 (which I have no
>clue what it is).

iA64 was Intel's replacement for the iA32 processor family.  It sports
an impressive collection of buzzwords that were state-of-the-art when
it was first announced.  It spent so long as vapourware and has turned
out to be such a flop that Intel wound up licensing the AMD64 (which
it re-named EM64T).

>My confusion is two-fold. One, they say the processor is 32/64. Can FreeBSD
>use the 64 aspect of this? And if so, is it ia64, or under i386?

In the "CPU" section of your dmesg, you should have a line "AMD
Features" with the "LM" flag set - this means you have an amd64/em64t.
To run in 64-bit mode, you need FreeBSD/amd64.

-- 
Peter Jeremy