Updating i386 in-place to amd64

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 08:44:15AM -0600 I heard the voice of
Guy Helmer, and lo! it spake thus:
> Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> 
> >Yesterday, I was playing updating the i386 6.0-STABLE in-place to
> >amd64 (the system was initially running on i386 core, then the disk
> >was moved to the Opteron server).  It succeeded, but there were
> >some fun.  The idea I had is to:
>
> Wow, I'm impressed.  I was trying to do an automated, in-place i386
> to amd64 upgrade (without source, though) back in August and never
> got to the point of successfully booting an amd64 kernel running
> i386 binaries.  I did get a good idea, though, that I never followed
> up on: Matthew Fuller suggested hijacking the swap partition for a
> temporary amd64 root partition (message id
> 20050809124756.GA27425 at over-yonder.net).

Yeah, I like the extra safety margin that gave.  I had a known-good
i386 partition to boot while I made sure the amd64 one booted, and
then a known-good (and pure) amd64 one to fall back on if I screwed up
blatting the amd64 stuff over the real partitions.  And it gave me an
excuse to track down all the loader variables that needed to be set to
boot off a different partition, which I've now re-forgotten (2 of 'em,
I think, needed to be changed?)  I never managed to get the amd64
kernel to load anything i386 in the boot path, either init (for
multiuser) or sh (for single-user).  This was 5.4, I think (maybe
5.3).


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.