Upgrading to amd64 requires recompilation of ports?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 11:52:34PM +0300, Kostik Belousov wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 04:19:21PM -0400, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 12:21:42PM +0200, Ivan Voras wrote:
> > > Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > > > On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 03:38:29AM +0200, Ivan Voras wrote:
> > > >> Indigo 23 wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >>> the ports? (I already know that it does require a recompilation of
> > > >>> world and the kernel).
> > > >> AFAIK nobody has succeeded in this (i.e. upgrading i386 to amd64 via
> > > >> buildkernel/world) on-line far enough to tell the tale. You might be the
> > > >> first :)
> > > > 
> > > > Nah, I've done it several times.
> > > 
> > > That's good news. Are there any particular problems in the process or
> > > does it "just work"?
> > 
> > I may have had to use the statically linked /rescue to do some things,
> > I don't remember.  It's not completely trivial, but someone who knows
> > their way around a FreeBSD system can do it.
> We did it by using miniroot on swap partition of the system disk.
> This approach has an advantage of keeping at least one good bootable
> base system installation in any moment. Also, it allows move in both
> directions, i.e. i386 <-> amd64.

Yeah, that's a neat trick to remember.  Another trick for doing
i386->amd64 is to install your new world into a DESTDIR, tar it up,
put the tarball onto the root filesystem, boot the new amd64 kernel
into single-user mode and use /rescue/tar to spam the amd64 tarball
over the i386 world.

Kris