Migrate system from i386 (32-bit mode) to amd64 (64-bit mode)

Motivation

If an amd64 hardware has been initially installed in 32-bit mode (i.e. as a plain i386 machine), it might later be desired to turn it into a full 64-bit machine.

The recommended way to do this is to back up all personal and important data, and reinstall using an amd64 installation medium.

However, it's also possible to migrate the machine through a rebuild from source code.

Much of this description has been inspired by Peter Wemm's mailing list article.

Prerequisites

Migration Process

Now the basic migration has been done.

Some 32-bit ports might not work, despite of the hackery to save their shared libs in a separate place. It's probably best to reinstall all ports. portupgrade -af doesn't work as it clobbers its own package database in the course of this operation (when reinstalling ruby and/or ruby-bdb).


CategoryHowTo

amd64/i386Migration (last edited 2019-05-05T12:13:42+0000 by KubilayKocak)