From owner-freebsd-amd64@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 29 05:13:24 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4B79516A4CE for ; Thu, 29 Jan 2004 05:13:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from tor-adm1.nbc.attcanada.ca (tor-adm1.business.allstream.net [207.181.89.5]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 00C4443D5A for ; Thu, 29 Jan 2004 05:13:18 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from taob@risc.org) Received: from tor-adm1.nbc.attcanada.ca (localhost [127.0.0.1]) i0TDDGwH026372 for ; Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:13:16 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost (ncc0070@localhost)i0TDDGKF026369 for ; Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:13:16 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: tor-adm1.nbc.attcanada.ca: ncc0070 owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:13:16 -0500 (EST) From: Brian Tao X-Sender: ncc0070@tor-adm1.nbc.attcanada.ca To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: New AMD64 owner X-BeenThere: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the AMD64 platform List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 13:13:24 -0000 First time posting to this list, although I've been running FreeBSD since the 1.1.5.1/2.0 days. After four years without a decent workstation at home, I finally took delivery of a dual Opteron 244 Tyan Tiger K8W system. I've got a few questions that I think I have the answers to, but wanted to confirm I'm going down the right path, since this architecture is still pretty new. AMD64 CPU's are supposed to have "seamless" backwards compatibility with 32-bit x86 code... I've confirmed this by watching Windows 98 boot up on my new system (it was what the integrator had installed to do some burn-in testing, presumably). If this is the case, why am I seeing references to broken ia32 compatibility? Shouldn't that "just work"? Or is this a kernel/loader issue with a 64-bit aware install? Related to the previous question: should I be able to install either freebsd-i386 or freebsd-amd64, and both will work? Obviously the i386 install will run in 32-bit mode, but at least it will run (and act as a really fast Intel box, I'm hoping). Or is there something inherent in the kernel or boot process that forces me to run freebsd-amd64, and cannot utilize the 32-bit compatibility of the CPU? The Tyan motherboard has an onboard Silicon Image 3114 S-ATA adapter. I have two WD Raptor drives attached. The aforementioned Windows 98 appears to boot and recognize the drives just fine (this is only booting to the command prompt, so there are no third-party drivers being loaded, AFAICT). This leads me to believe that the BIOS or the S-ATA adapter itself is able to dumb itself down to look like a normal IDE drive. However, when I tried to boot the 5.2-RELEASE installer, it was not able to find any drives. I noticed that Soren recently committed a change to support the 3114's, but that doesn't help me if I can't get FreeBSD on the damn disks in the first place. ;-) So I popped over to current.freebsd.org to see if I could grab a newer ISO (post-Jan 17) with the right SATA drivers. Latest successful build is Jan 24, so I'm hoping that will work. I don't see an amd64 directory tree there though, which goes back to my earlier question about doing an i386 binary install on an amd64 platform. Is it possible to subsequently do a source build upgrade to amd64? Or do we not have the tools to do that yet? Thanks for your patience... I'm looking forward to helping improve freebsd-amd64! -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob@risc.org) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"