32-bit jails on a 64-bit system?

[Charles Sprickman]

Howdy,

I saw this little tidbit in the 8.0 Release Notes...

----
The jail(8) subsystem has been updated. Changes include:

Compatibility support which permits 32-bit jail binaries to be used on 
64-bit systems to manage jails has been added.
----

I know prior to 8.0 with some fancy footwork you could do some interesting 
things (for example, I have a jail running a bunch of 32-bit 4.11 stuff on 
a 7.2 amd64 box), but it was not easy.

Looking at the jail manpage and handbook entries, I'm not seeing anything 
that further explains the changes.  I've been able to get some things 
working in a test setup, but not everything.  Any pointers to what exactly 
that blurb in the release notes actually means?  Google is getting me 
nowhere.

My current scenario is this...  I have a backups server with a ton of 
space.  Nightly backups run to this and get zfs-snapshotted each night.  I 
also have created jails for a number of important hosts so that should I 
lose a host, I can bring up a jail on this box to replace it while I 
repair things.  One host is a 7.2/i386 box.  The backups host is 
8.0/amd64.  Ideally I'd like to copy everything, including the base OS 
into this jail, except for perhaps "ps", "top" and other utilities that 
might have issues.

Any pointers appreciated...

Thanks,

Charles
___
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
spork at bway.net - 212.655.9344