A debian newbie installs 32/64 on a dual opteron
A semi-rambling note that may encourage others to take the plunge.
And just to make this more interesting, I'd never built a PC from
scratch before. Off to Fry's to buy a case, motherboard, power supply,
two processors, 2G of registered ECC memory, a 250G ide disk, a cdrom,
and a floppy drive. I also stuck in a tulip based ethernet card so I
wouldn't have to depend on getting gigabit drivers right for network
connectivity during the install(s). 4 hours later the machine is
together, up, and running woody on the default 2.4.18 i386 kernel; not
too impressive, but it's a start.
Another 24 hours and the box is running a testing+32/64 bit kernel with
a couple of chroot environments. The first chroot is a minimalist woody
(plus libdb1-compat) to which has been added libc6 and lib64c biarch
libraries plus the same 32/64 kernel as used in the base system and
modutils so I can load kernel modules (notably tulip and tg3 ethernet).
The second chroot is testing upgraded with the biarch tool chain from
arndb plus other goodies which I can thrash without hurting the rest of
the system. chroots created with debootstrap with proc mounted on each
on for good measure.
I've also installed a 2.4.22-1-smp-k7 kernel in the base system as an
alternate to the 2.4.21-amd64-smp kernel that is currently running in
case I do something real stupid like break the woody chroot that gives
me modutils/network access on 64 bit kernels.
All in all relatively painless. I only ran into two gotchas. One
obvious and the other not so. First, was accessing more 137GB on the
250G disk. A little reading told me that I needed a 2.4.20 or better
kernel. And since there was one in woody I gave that a try; no dice.
Problem was that the AMD chipset wasn't recognized as LBA48 capable
until 2.4.21. Upgrading to 2.4.22 got the full 250G. Also the tg3
drivers for the gigabit ethernet drivers were working in both the 2.4.21
and 2.4.22 kernels so I got that working for free in process. The
second not so obvious thing was that installing the 2.4.22-1-k7-smp
kernel seemed to make enough changes so that even after subsequently
installing the 2.4.21-amd-smp kernel that 64 bit _amd64 modutils
wouldn't install cleanly complaining about unknown x86-64 architecture.
I didn't figure out why, I simply created the simple woody chroot and
went directly from the default kernel to the 32/64 bit there installed
modutils on top of that and decided to leave well enough alone.
-Steve
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