evil idea

[Astrodog]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Astrodog <astrodog at gmail.com>
Date: Oct 26, 2007 11:34 PM
Subject: Re: evil idea
To: "Aryeh M. Friedman" <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com>


On 10/26/07, Aryeh M. Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am running amd64 8-CURRENT and there are a few i386 only ports that I
> absolutely must have installed and at the same time since I have 4 GB of
> RAM all kinds of bizarreness is created if I "downgrade" to i386.   So
> here is the idea:   use qemu to create a virtual version of my machine
> (with less then 2GB or RAM) and install i386 8-CURRENT on it (I want to
> use -CURRENT for all my installs)
>
> Any thing I should watch out for here (I know I need to use NFS or
> something like it to share files between the host and guest OS's)
>

There's actually a known system that will work for this. You can use
your existing swap partition, as an "extra" root partition, installing
there, then booting to that, then rebuild/install to your original
partition. Its the same basic idea as the method for updating from
4.x->7.x, and should be on the lists. (Note to docs, might be worth
putting it somewhere.)

--- Harrison