In article <502219.69779.qm@web51504.mail.re2.yahoo.com>,
Gary Thorpe  <gathorpe79@yahoo.com> wrote:
>--- Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 03:08:47PM -0500, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
>> > About a week ago I ws going to upgrade my system from Oct 4 current
>> to
>> > current current.  Suddenly the CVS updates exploded so I decided to
>> > hold off until things settled down.  Is it a reasonably safe time
>> now
>> > to upgrade?  I understand all the caveats with running current so I
>> am
>> > just looking for known instabilities.
>> > 
>> > Also, I am running i386 on an AMD64 box because I needed
>> OpenOffice.
>> > It seems that that is now supported on amd64 so I was going to go
>> to
>> > that port as well.  Can I just unpack the sets over an existing
>> i386
>> > installation or are there deeper changes needed?
>> 
>> I've done this on one or 2 devel system, and it did go relatively
>> well.
>> I'd recommend booting an INSTALL kernel with embeded ramdisk and use
>> sysinst to do the upgrade though; switching the currently running
>> userland
>> may have unexpected issues (I just dropped an INSTALL kernel in / and
>> booted it)
>> 
>
>Isn't amd64 supposed to be able to support running 32-bit i386 binaries
>with COMPAT_NETBSD32 or it just not working in current right now?

You need to install the 32 bit libraries in /emul/netbsd32 first.

>It seems like it would be better to leave most applications as 32-bit
>that don't require 64-bit capabilities (OpenOffice seems like a good
>candidate for this unless you need large file/memory handling?).
>

I think that in the amd64 case 64 bit applications end up running
faster because the compiler can make use of the extra registers.

christos