Upgrade from FreeBSD 7.1/i386 to FreeBSD 7.1/AMD64?

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 12:59:21PM -0800, Andrew Moran wrote:
> 
> Thank you.

You're welcome!

Please don't top post; it destroys the flow of the conversation.
 
> I have 8 gigs of memory in this system, and I decided go to the ZFS  
> route, and am now getting kernel panics about kmem exhaustion.  I know  
> there are some tweaks I can do to help alleviate these, but I want to  
> address all my memory before I increase the kernel memory.

Ah, OK. ZFS seems to work better on (and was written for) 64-bit systems
anyway.

> I don't need the ports to be 64-bit, but they SHOULD run just fine  
> without recompiling, yes?

As long as you don't ever recompile anything. Otherwise the shit will
hit the fan. The base system by default keeps two sets of system
libraries on amd64, 64-bit and 32-bit. (you can compile the system
without the 32-bit libs and kernel stuff if you don't need them; see
src.conf(5) and the COMPAT_IA32 option in the amd64 GENERIC kernel). So
the base system can run both kinds of binaries, as long as they only
depend on the base system libraries. But if you recompile any library
from ports, it will become 64-bit and unusable to 32-bit binaries. Every
program depending on that library will stop working. Just recompile your
ports and save yourself a world of grief in the long run.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914  B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20090223/8ac45716/attachment.pgp