On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:27 AM, <meino.cra...@gmx.de> wrote: > Hi, > > My box is a working and fully configured Gentoo system, which is > uptodate. > > For the sake of being able to address more RAM and for more > calculation power (mainly for rendering purposes) I want to > migrate to 64bit. > > I googled for some tutorial but found nothing appropiate (one post > asked for the downtime to be expected while migrating a server -- > something which not applies to me...). > > My questions are: > 1) Is there a performance gain, when migrating to 64bit if the > target applications supports 64bit? > 2) Is it possible - if( true ){ how(); } - to """simply""" > "convert" a 32bit system to 64 bit. > "Simply" in my case means: Simpler ways than starting right > from the bare metal of a virgin harddisk and doing the same > stuff I did for the current system again... ;) > 3) Is there some tutorial, which show me the path to go? > > Thank you very much in advance for any help! > > Best regards, > mcc >
I think there are some performance advantages but frankly I don't 'feel' them running my systems. None the less if my system is 64-bit capable I build 64-bit. There is no 'conversion' or 'upgrade' path that I know about. The way I did what you are talking about is to build a second Gentoo install of 64-bit on the same system. and then reference my same home directories which are on a partition by themselves. Make sure you use the same ID numbers for users and groups, etc., but if you do that you can still run 32-bit until the 64-bit is running and stable, and then wipe the 32-bit partitions to get the disk space back. I used the 32-bit grub installation, added the 64-bit kernel, and then never installed grub from within 64-bit. The old version is still out there and still boots even though the 32-bit install no longer exists. Hope this helps, Mark