install questions

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 12:55:36 +1100, Christopher Vance <c at nu.org> wrote:

> I have been a happy user of FreeBSD/i386 since 2.2.6.  I have always
> tracked stable, and often had current on another partition.
> 
> I have i386 install CDs for 5.2, and have successfully used them to
> install /i386 on my amd64.
> 
> I am considering upgrading to /amd64 on the same machine.  Can
> I use the sysinstall I already have to do a network install of /amd64
> stuff from a server somewhere, or do I need a 64-bit sysinstall to do
> this from?  I'm happy to newfs the partition if that's appropriate -
> it has nothing valuable on it.

You can do what I did: cvsup the complete source tree, setup a new
kernel config file under sys/amd64/conf and do a buildworld buildkernel,
etc. with TARGET_ARCH=amd64.  Worked great for me!

> I've seen suggestions that I can run /i386 stuff on /amd64 provided
> the kernel emulation is included and the 32-bit libraries are present.
> Are these 32-bit libraries identical to the i386 ones, or have they
> been tweaked to know they are emulating on /amd64?

Running IA32 binaries *is* possible, but it's still a little kludgey.
I've managed to get things to run in experiments, but on the whole, I'd
just as soon not even bother with 32-bit stuff (except for Linux
emulation, where 32-bit is all we've got for now).

HTH

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"