Mixing amd64 kernel with i386 world

[Peter Jeremy]

I have a system with 4GB RAM and hence need to use an amd64 kernel to use
all the RAM (I can only access 3GB RAM with an i386 kernel).  OTOH, amd64
processes are significantly (50-100%) larger than equivalent i386 processes
and none none of the applications I'll be running on the system need to be
64-bit.

This implies that the optimal approach is an amd64 kernel with i386
userland (I'm ignoring PAE as a useable approach).  I've successfully
run i386 jails on amd64 systems so I know this mostly works.  I also
know that there are some gotchas:
- kdump needs to match the kernel
- anything accessing /dev/mem or /dev/kmem (which implies anything that
  uses libkvm) probably needs to match the kernel.

Has anyone investigated this approach?

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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