evil idea

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-10-27 21:49, mv <mrkvrg at acm.org> wrote:
> On 10/26/07, Aryeh M. Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am running amd64 8-CURRENT and there are a few i386 only ports that I
> > absolutely must have installed and at the same time since I have
> > 4 GB of RAM all kinds of bizarreness is created if I "downgrade"
> > to i386.   So here is the idea:   use qemu to create a virtual
> > version of my machine (with less then 2GB or RAM) and install
> > i386 8-CURRENT on it (I want to use -CURRENT for all my installs)
>
> On Sat, 27 October 2007 20:33:44 Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> > I don't think Aryeh wants to "install i386 over his current amd64".
> >
> > What he seems to be asking is if he can run *two* versions, one of
> > them as a virtualized host under qemu.  That should work, AFAIK.
>
> Would installing Freebsd i386 within a jail on an amd64 host solve his
> problem?

I don't know if that would 'solve' the problem, but one major difference
from qemu is that a jailed host runs the same kernel with the master.

This means that i386 programs do not run in 'native' i386 mode, but in
emulated mode.  The FreeBSD kernel already includes support for running
i386 programs in emulated mode, but since I haven't done this I am not
sure how feasible or useful it is.