Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo 32bit->64bit: How?

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:27 AM,  <meino.cramer@×××.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My box is a working and fully configured Gentoo system, which is
> uptodate.
>
> For the sake of being able to address more RAM and for more
> calculation power (mainly for rendering purposes) I want to
> migrate to 64bit.
>
> I googled for some tutorial but found nothing appropiate (one post
> asked for the downtime to be expected while migrating a server --
> something which not applies to me...).
>
> My questions are:
> 1) Is there a performance gain, when migrating to 64bit if the
>   target applications supports 64bit?
> 2) Is it possible - if( true ){  how(); } - to """simply"""
>   "convert" a 32bit system to 64 bit.
>   "Simply" in my case means: Simpler ways than starting right
>   from the bare metal of a virgin harddisk and doing the same
>   stuff I did for the current system again... ;)
> 3) Is there some tutorial, which show me the path to go?
>
> Thank you very much in advance for any help!
>
> Best regards,
> mcc
>

I think there are some performance advantages but frankly I don't
'feel' them running my systems. None the less if my system is 64-bit
capable I build 64-bit.

There is no 'conversion' or 'upgrade' path that I know about. The way
I did what you are talking about is to build a second Gentoo install
of 64-bit on the same system. and then reference my same home
directories which are on a partition by themselves. Make sure you use
the same ID numbers for users and groups, etc., but if you do that you
can still run 32-bit until the 64-bit is running and stable, and then
wipe the 32-bit partitions to get the disk space back.

I used the 32-bit grub installation, added the 64-bit kernel, and then
never installed grub from within 64-bit. The old version is still out
there and still boots even though  the 32-bit install no longer
exists.

Hope this helps,
Mark