evil idea

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-10-26 23:34, Astrodog <astrodog at gmail.com> wrote:
>On 10/26/07, Aryeh M. Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am running amd64 8-CURRENT and there are a few i386 only ports that I
>> absolutely must have installed and at the same time since I have 4 GB of
>> RAM all kinds of bizarreness is created if I "downgrade" to i386.   So
>> here is the idea:   use qemu to create a virtual version of my machine
>> (with less then 2GB or RAM) and install i386 8-CURRENT on it (I want to
>> use -CURRENT for all my installs)
>>
>> Any thing I should watch out for here (I know I need to use NFS or
>> something like it to share files between the host and guest OS's)
> 
> There's actually a known system that will work for this. You can use
> your existing swap partition, as an "extra" root partition, installing
> there, then booting to that, then rebuild/install to your original
> partition. Its the same basic idea as the method for updating from
> 4.x->7.x, and should be on the lists. (Note to docs, might be worth
> putting it somewhere.)

I don't think Aryeh wants to "install i386 over his current amd64".

What he seems to be asking is if he can run *two* versions, one of
them as a virtualized host under qemu.  That should work, AFAIK.