AW: FreeBSD 5.3; howto migrate from i386 to amd64 mode

[David O'Brien]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 12:30:30PM -0600, Chris Dillon wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Peter Wemm wrote:
> >The difficulty is working around the catch-22 situation where you 
> >need a new kernel first so you can install world, and you need a new 
> >world first before you can boot the new kernel.  Cheating and using 
> >the swap partition for a temporary world is one way around it.  It 
> >might even be necessary to do a new buildworld inside the temporary 
> >world if you can't reinstall the previous one.  Some creativity will 
> >be needed.
> 
> Isn't this where /usr/src/installworld_oldk could come in handy? 
> Apparently there was a similar chicken & egg problem updating 
> FreeBSD/sparc64 to 64BTT but installworld_oldk claims it can be used 
> for any situation where you need to install a majorly incompatible 
> old-kernel/new-world.

This moving an installed 32-bit system to 64-bit has so much potential
for food shooting, that I don't think we should come close to making it
easy.  There is reason that no other Unix supports such a thing on AMD64.
People should back up their data and do a fresh install.  Those that are
true hard-core tinkers, a recipe has been posted.  If they don't
understand the steps and can't follow them; they probably shouldn't be
trying this approach.
 
-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)