32-bit jails on a 64-bit system?

[Miroslav Lachman]

Charles Sprickman wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I saw this little tidbit in the 8.0 Release Notes...
>
> ----
> The jail(8) subsystem has been updated. Changes include:
>
> Compatibility support which permits 32-bit jail binaries to be used on
> 64-bit systems to manage jails has been added.
> ----
>
> I know prior to 8.0 with some fancy footwork you could do some
> interesting things (for example, I have a jail running a bunch of 32-bit
> 4.11 stuff on a 7.2 amd64 box), but it was not easy.
>
> Looking at the jail manpage and handbook entries, I'm not seeing
> anything that further explains the changes. I've been able to get some
> things working in a test setup, but not everything. Any pointers to what
> exactly that blurb in the release notes actually means? Google is
> getting me nowhere.
>
> My current scenario is this... I have a backups server with a ton of
> space. Nightly backups run to this and get zfs-snapshotted each night. I
> also have created jails for a number of important hosts so that should I
> lose a host, I can bring up a jail on this box to replace it while I
> repair things. One host is a 7.2/i386 box. The backups host is
> 8.0/amd64. Ideally I'd like to copy everything, including the base OS
> into this jail, except for perhaps "ps", "top" and other utilities that
> might have issues.

(freebsd-jail@ was added in to Cc:)

I think it is nothing new to 8.0, it is the same as release note for 7.2.

I didn't test it, but I think you can install (copy) i386 jail (or whole 
system) in to amd64 host and just run it as any other jail.

Miroslav Lachman