i386/amd64 co-exist

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at ceid.upatras.gr
Sat Sep 10 16:45:33 PDT 2005


On 2005-09-10 17:29, "Haulmark, Chris" <chris at sigd.net> wrote:
>Someone broke the silence:
>> I would like to be able to setup a system so that on power up I can
>> choose weather to boot into either i386 or amd64.
>> Is this possible or would I some how have to install the two
>> releases on their own?

> Ask yourself this question.
>
> I would like to be able to set up a vehicle that I can choose wheather
> to use v4 motor or v8 motor.  That's so when I toss a car key to this
> kid, he will only use the vehicle with V4 motor enabled.  When I take
> this same car key, I want to use a vehicle with a V8.  Can both V4 and
> V8 co-exist in a single vehicle?

Flawed analogy, if you ask me.  Sure you can do what the original poster
asked.

Solaris 10 does this already in their Core OS distribution, and with a bit of
effort you can probably share the same i386 /, /var and /usr filesystem
between 2 kernels running from different /boot subdirectories, but you will
only be able to use i386 binaries this way (since the amd64 cpus can run i386
binaries too).

Booting with two different root partitions and a common /home is ok too, but
configuration changes in (say) /etc and other places will have to be synced
manually between the two.



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