AMD64 support in 5.x versions

[Jem Matzan]

I've tried just about everything AMD64 in terms of operating systems,
and I can say for certain that no one is anywhere near the level of
functionality that their i386 arch is. Even SuSE and RedHat with their
retail box AMD64 distros only offer limited AMD64 functionality. Gentoo
will install but few things will compile properly. I'd consider FreeBSD
and NetBSD further along than Gentoo at this point, except for the fact
that Gentoo can update its source code and FreeBSD can't (without the
special hacked CVSup).
FreeBSD would be a step ahead of everyone else if IA32 binary
compatibility worked.

-Jem

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 05:19, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Will Saxon wrote:
> 
> > It does boot multi user w/o acpi on my system, I can log in and do some
> > things, but without network support I was not able to do much since I
> > had no packages or port installation capability.
> 
> One option is to use some nasty leftover hardware from somewhere - for
> instance, I had an old 3Com 3c905 (?) card lying around, used that for
> initial networking, fetched the cvsup package from David O'Brien (?),
> adjusted the supfiles (because it doesn't support compress - as noted on
> the webpage, but not everybody seems to read that), updated to -CURRENT,
> and went from there. In theory _everybody_ has a leftover PCI NIC
> somewhere :)
> 
> > I plan to give it another try after -RELEASE and spend more time with
> > it. Right now I am slogging through a "why did I let them convince me to
> > use 'stage 1'" gentoo x86_64 install. I'm sure linux will work well for
> > me on this system but after several years of FreeBSD use Linux feels
> > like a wet pair of socks...yuck...
> 
> Reports I've heard - perhaps from James on this list - are that Gentoo
> amd64 and the other available Linuxen are just as wonky, if you can get
> them to compile at all.
-- 
Jem Matzan <techsupport at thejemreport.com>