Upgrading to 64 bit from a 32 bit installation on FBSD 7

[Andrew Berry]

On 18-Sep-08, at 2:37 AM, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> Andrew Berry wrote:
>> Can I simply rebuild the world (or use freebsd-update), and  
>> portupgrade everything to rebuild for amd64? Or, will things break  
>> as libraries are upgraded which still have 32-bit dependancies on  
>> the system?
>
> This is a pretty common question, did you try searching the archives  
> or google for the answer?

Yes, I did, and was quite surprised when I didn't find a clear answer :)

>> Also, AFAIK upgrading to a 64 bit system allows access to  
>> additional registers on the CPU, leading to a performance increase.  
>> The system will only have 1.5 gigs of RAM, so that's not an issue,  
>> but are there any benchmarks out there comparing performance on <  
>> 4GB hardware with 32 bit and 64 bit Freebsd?
>
> Performance is not a single number.  Sometimes 64-bit systems can be  
> slower, sometimes faster.  Run it on your own workload or look for a  
> narrowly tailored benchmark and see what happens for you.

The main workload on this machine is SpamAssassin and gcc (for  
updating ports). So I guess I'll have to look into Perl specifically  
then.

Thanks,
--Andrew