I bought myself a new amd64 machine. I intend to run FreeBSD/amd64 on it, and perhaps some other BSD's as well. I'm not in the -current game, so I'll stick to -stable for now. Would I gain anything by running FreeBSD/i386 (on another slice) on this machine? This is my first amd64 machine (actually, it's my first amd powered machine), and I haven't followed the development on the amd64 closely. Do most of the ports work on amd64? Are there any other caveats? -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen, Norway
On Mar 21, 2005, at 5:39 PM, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:> Would I gain anything by running FreeBSD/i386 (on another slice) on > this > machine?Some software doesn't work or isn't entirely reliable on a 64-bit platform yet; such would run better on the 32-bit x86 version.> Do most of the ports work on amd64? > Are there any other caveats?Most of the ports work fine on AMD64, but there are some caveats with some of the bigger and more complex ones (things like Java, Linux binary emulation, undoubtedly others). Consider the output of: find /usr/ports -name Makefile -exec grep -l 'BROKEN.*amd64' {} \; [ This is about 64 ports, but is not complete, there is also the ONLY_FOR_ARCHES variable... ] -- -Chuck
On Mar 21, 2005, at 5:39 PM, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:> This is my first amd64 machine (actually, it's my first amd powered > machine), and I haven't followed the development on the amd64 closely. > > Do most of the ports work on amd64? > Are there any other caveats? >There are a handful of ports that have 64-bit issues, but they are getting cleaned up gradually. The only major bottleneck I have as of today is one perl module, IO::Interface, which will compile, but when run return empty data rather than proper lists. I'm sure it has to do with 64-bittedness, since it works on i386 FreeBSD 5.3. I'll track that down and fix it sooner or later... Vivek Khera, Ph.D. +1-301-869-4449 x806