Updating i386 in-place to amd64

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 08:59:19AM -0600, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> 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?)
> 
Nope, just one, always visible with kenv(1) when I forget it:

vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/ad0a"

Or "boot -a" in loader(8).

> 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).
> 
Well, this "somehow" works now.


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov
ru at FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer
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