Progress with usability of AMD64

[Greg Black]

When I first did an AMD64 install on my then-new 64-bit hardware, I was
happy with the way FreeBSD itself behaved, but seriously hampered by the
huge number of ports that were marked broken for 64-bit architectures at
that time.  Eventually, I just re-installed as i386 and went on with my
life.

Since we're close to a new release, I'm wondering what experience people
have had recently with running in 64-bit mode.  Are most of those broken
ports now fixed?  Or is there some magic that allows building of just
the broken ones in 32-bit mode such that they'll run on a 64-bit box?
Or is it viable to build those ports on a 32-bit i386 and expect them to
just run on the AMD64?  Or is there some other solution (other than
doing without the broken stuff)?

Since this is not strictly on topic for this list, perhaps people could
reply direct to me.  If I get some interesting information, I'll post a
summary here in a short while.

Greg