From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Feb 23 19:43:48 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2048016A420 for ; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:43:48 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from xfb52@dial.pipex.com) Received: from asmtp-out5.blueyonder.co.uk (asmtp-out5.blueyonder.co.uk [195.188.213.64]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ABBF743D46 for ; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:43:47 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from xfb52@dial.pipex.com) Received: from [82.41.33.116] (helo=[192.168.0.2]) by asmtp-out5.blueyonder.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1FCMNN-0003Lj-Rb; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:43:45 +0000 Message-ID: <43FE1071.6080008@dial.pipex.com> Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:43:45 +0000 From: Alex Zbyslaw User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-GB; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051106 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Nikolas Britton References: <43FD9A34.7030401@dial.pipex.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Can't seem to boot from 6.0-RELEASE X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:43:48 -0000 Nikolas Britton wrote: >I see, do the Intel EMT-64 chips use the amd64 release too? And what >did he mean by "certain programs being unavalable for amd64", what are >the major ones? > > There seems to be an IA-64 which I guess is Intel. Only buy AMD chips myself, so I'm a bit hazy on that. I'm sure freebsd.org has the answer somewhere :-) Major programs include java, and I think, Linux 32-bit compatibility. You can see a complete list of ports which fail to build at http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/ e.g. the ones not building under 5-STABLE for AMD64 are in http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/amd64-5-failure.html. Of course, some of those packages just fail to build anywhere! But lack of java and nvidia are big stumblers for many who might otherwise try 64-bit on a desktop. For a pure server, given the time, I'd certainly experiment with 64-bit. Unfortunately, all "my" pure servers run Linux - not through choice :-( You described 64-bit chips as bleeding edge, but I really don't think they are any more. Dual cores may be bleeding edge and SLI may be bleeding edge, but bog standard 64-bit processors running a 32-bit OS are dead common and usually seem to work. No doubt there are some chipsets/motherboards that are worse than others, but that's the same for any architecture. Buying anything to run FreeBSD well has always been a matter of checking the hardware lists carefully and backing that up with google. 8 months ago I had no trouble finding an AMD 939 64 bit motherboard that would work well with FreeBSD. --Alex