When will the amd64 be supported?

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2010-Jun-04 10:04:11 +0100, Pete French <petefrench at ticketswitch.com> wrote:
>> That seems to be overcomplicating things a bit, but yes.. the general
>> strategy would be something along those lines.
>
>Am curious that you think it's overcomplicating matters - can you think
>of a way of doing it with only one drive ? That the simplest procedure
>I amnaged to come up with when migrating machine from 32 to 64. As
>I;ve got a few which still need ding then any simpler method is of
>great interest (especially one which doesnt require a 2nd drive!)

In theory, you should be able to just steal a disk partition - swap
being the most obvious:  Disable swap, newfs it and mount it as /mnt,
install kernel and world into it and configure it as root.  Reboot
onto /mnt (manually specify the 'b' partition to boot1) and do an
installkernel/world onto your original partitions then reboot back
into them.

It might be slightly quicker and easier to dump/restore your existing
i386 root (and minimal parts of /usr) into /mnt, boot into it and the
just do a single installkernel/world onto your original partitions.
I'm not sure of the exact parts of /usr that will be necessary.

Keep in mind that you'll need to rebuild all your ports as soon as
you rebuild any.  And anything that gets too chummy with the kernel
innards won't work until it's rebuilt.

Some time ago, I did manage to do an in-place amd64 to i386 conversion
(and revert using a ZFS snapshot).

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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