Conroe & Asus P5B. Should I convert?

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 11:01:10AM -0700, Nicholas Sayer wrote:
> I have a Conroe (E6600) running on an Asus P5B. This motherboard is  
> based on the P965 chipset. Right now it's running as an i386. I've  
> had to hack a few of the drivers to properly recognize this system,  
> but the important parts of it do work correctly.
> 
> Since the CPU has EM64T capability, I'm considering switching the  
> machine over. I've read some of the list archives and believe I can  
> use a temporary 2nd drive to do the cross-build, boot and upgrade  
> rigamarole.

It might be easier to try and boot and install from a 6.1 amd64
CD-ROM. Then install your patches and build a new kernel+world.
 
> I'm a bit more concerned about the ports. I see the COMPAT_IA32  
> option in the kernel configuration. Can I expect my installed  
> packages to work after the upgrade? Specifically at least Apache 2,  
> PHP, JDK15, PostgreSQL 8.1 annd KDE?

Since all these work natively on amd64, I wouldn't use the i386
versions. Especially if you'd like to link programs to the KDE or
PostgreSQL libraries.

I'm not sure if you can link a 64-bit program to a 32-bit library and
expect it to work.

> I guess since I have a working system now, I'm sort of looking for a  
> reason not to break it. :)

Make dumps of your partitions and back them up. If amd64 doesn't work
well enough you can easily restore your i386 system.

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: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/attachments/20060822/4882ed5b/attachment.pgp