When I first did an AMD64 install on my then-new 64-bit hardware, I was happy with the way FreeBSD itself behaved, but seriously hampered by the huge number of ports that were marked broken for 64-bit architectures at that time. Eventually, I just re-installed as i386 and went on with my life. Since we're close to a new release, I'm wondering what experience people have had recently with running in 64-bit mode. Are most of those broken ports now fixed? Or is there some magic that allows building of just the broken ones in 32-bit mode such that they'll run on a 64-bit box? Or is it viable to build those ports on a 32-bit i386 and expect them to just run on the AMD64? Or is there some other solution (other than doing without the broken stuff)? Since this is not strictly on topic for this list, perhaps people could reply direct to me. If I get some interesting information, I'll post a summary here in a short while. Greg
[note: this question probably should have been asked and answered on freebsd-ports@, but I'll go ahead and answer it here in any case.] The latest chart that compares package status across build environments is at http://portsmon.freebsd.org/chartsandgraphs/package_comparison.html. Note: the detail pages that it points to are several weeks stale. (The copies on my development machine are up-to-date, however). The full list of what ports do not package on amd64-7 is at http://portsmon.freebsd.org/chartsandgraphs/package_failures_list.amd64-7.html. It will give you more information than you probably want to know about the exact state of amd64-7 as of that date. On my machine, the latest stats for amd64-7 are the following: 232 errors 1195 skipped ports 548 dependent ports as opposed to i386-7: 268 errors 636 skipped ports 429 dependent ports and i386-6: 70 errors 449 skipped ports 217 dependent ports and amd64-6: 62 errors 1007 skipped ports 775 dependent ports I've been trying to do a lot of work to give us metrics about the state of the packages, but this work is not yet in production. Note: some of these numbers are a little high because a patch file for java/diablo-jdk15 didn't fetch properly, leading to a bunch of dependent java ports not being built. This has now been fixed. mcl
On Sep 27, 2007, at 8:22 PM, Greg Black wrote:> Since we're close to a new release, I'm wondering what experience > people > have had recently with running in 64-bit mode. Are most of those > broken > ports now fixed? Or is there some magic that allows building of just > the broken ones in 32-bit mode such that they'll run on a 64-bit box?In practice, I have exactly one port I need in 64-bit that is not functional, and that is because it is a binary-only distribution of the Adaptec command line utility. No other software I've tried has failed to build or run on 6.2/amd64. My list of software is purely server stuff; I don't use any FreeBSD desktops.