Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:59:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Wright <andrewhw@ieee.org> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: OpenBSD -> FreeBSD migration Message-ID: <alpine.BSO.1.10.0804201527430.30316@U48.N136.QueensU.CA>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi All;
I want to migrate a system from OpenBSD 4.2 (ie; the current version)
to FreeBSD (7.0). I have poked around on the archives a little
to determine how best to do this, and I want to make sure that
my understanding (summarized below) is indeed correct. If I am
asking these questions on the wrong list (potentially likely for
the AMD specific questions) then please let me know:
Filesystem stuff:
- it appears that FreeBSD and OpenBSD use the same partition
table format. Is this true? If so, I can potentially avoid
rebuilding an entire disk if I am right that ...
- FreeBSD can mount and read OpenBSD's version of the 4.2 BSD
filesystem implementation
If both of these are true, I can simply install FreeBSD over
top of the OpenBSD /, /var and /usr partitions, and then be
able to mount the old /home. Is this something people do?
- even if the above isn't true, it appears that the format used
by dump/restore is consistent. I have tried dumping/restoring
some small filesystems to test this, but if this is an unsupported
way to go, I would like to know now.
Also, before someone (quite rightly) says "back up your data",
I will note that the reason that I would like to be able to read
from /home is to avoid a lengthy restore -- all this data is
backed up, but if there is no reason to re-label the drive and
reformat the various user data partitions (on various drives) and
then spend a day running restore, then I would like avoid such a
waste of time.
If this is even slightly likely to cause problems though, please
let me know and I will start swapping media.
- if I have somehow misled myself that restore(8) is consistent,
please let me know -- re-installing the old OS just to back up
to some other format would be a giant waste of time.
Processor stuff:
- The machine of interest has an AMD64 processor. I have seen
several references to running Linux emulation on an AMD processor,
but I would like to confirm that this is true while running the
64-bit version of the OS. In other words:
- with a 64-bit installation (amd64) of FreeBSD 7.0, emulation
of 32-bit Linux binaries (notably Matlab, but possibly other
software as well) is possible, and indeed a reasonably
well-known way of proceeding.
If I'm crazy, and/or misreading the docs, please let me know.
Thanks,
Andrew.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?alpine.BSO.1.10.0804201527430.30316>