Upgrade from FreeBSD 7.1/i386 to FreeBSD 7.1/AMD64?

[Andrew Moran]

Thank you.

I have 8 gigs of memory in this system, and I decided go to the ZFS  
route, and am now getting kernel panics about kmem exhaustion.  I know  
there are some tweaks I can do to help alleviate these, but I want to  
address all my memory before I increase the kernel memory.

I don't need the ports to be 64-bit, but they SHOULD run just fine  
without recompiling, yes?

--Andy

On Feb 23, 2009, at 12:05 PM, Roland Smith wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 11:30:10AM -0800, Andrew Moran wrote:
>>
>> I installed the i386 distro on my Core 2 Duo instead of AMD64 and now
>> I want to switch to using AMD64.
>
> First of all, your Core2 Duo should work just fine with i386. The  
> amd64
> architecture is an extension of the x86 arch. Unless you regularly run
> out of address space on i386, there is no _need_ to install amd64. Be
> aware that some ports (especially binary drivers and ditto plugins)  
> only
> run on i386.
>
>> Is there a good path to do this?  Will I have to reinstall,
>
> Reinstalling is probably the wisest course. Also be aware that you  
> need
> to remove and rebuild all your ports if you want them to be 64-bit.
>
>> or can I do a buildworld/installworld over the i386?
>
> You can cross-build, but you'll need to install the new kernel and  
> world
> to a separate partition and boot from that partition.
>
> Roland
> -- 
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
> [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much  
> appreciated]
> pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914  B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID:  
> C321A725)