Can't seem to boot from 6.0-RELEASE

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Nikolas Britton wrote:

>I see, do the Intel EMT-64 chips use the amd64 release too? And what
>did he mean by "certain programs being unavalable for amd64", what are
>the major ones?
>  
>
There seems to be an IA-64 which I guess is Intel.  Only buy AMD chips 
myself, so I'm a bit hazy on that.  I'm sure freebsd.org has the answer 
somewhere :-)

Major programs include java, and I think, Linux 32-bit compatibility.  
You can see a complete list of ports which fail to build at 
http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/ e.g. the ones not building under 5-STABLE 
for AMD64 are in 
http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/amd64-5-failure.html.  Of course, 
some of those packages just fail to build anywhere!  But lack of java 
and nvidia are big stumblers for many who might otherwise try 64-bit on 
a desktop.  For a pure server, given the time, I'd certainly experiment 
with 64-bit.  Unfortunately, all "my" pure servers run Linux - not 
through choice :-(

You described 64-bit chips as bleeding edge, but I really don't think 
they are any more.  Dual cores may be bleeding edge and SLI may be 
bleeding edge, but bog standard 64-bit processors running a 32-bit OS 
are dead common and usually seem to work.  No doubt there are some 
chipsets/motherboards that are worse than others, but that's the same 
for any architecture.  Buying anything to run FreeBSD well has always 
been a matter of checking the hardware lists carefully and backing that 
up with google.  8 months ago I had no trouble finding an AMD 939 64 bit 
motherboard that would work well with FreeBSD.

--Alex