Solved installing i386 packages from terminal on amd64 system?

Samuel Venable

Samuel Venable

Hi,

I wanted to export a game I created to i386 architecture but the build process eats up way too much RAM on an actual i386 installation of FreeBSD. This means I need to do it on an amd64 installation of FreeBSD, but I still need the actual i386 packages to link to them properly.

I've searched these forums for existing solutions, but the answers I found were addressed to people who were more familar with this OS than I am, so they were able to solve the issue, but I personally was confused by the solution and I come from a Linux background so this is a very different ecosystem to me.

The two OS's have a very similar structure due to their ancestry, but I still have a lot to learn about FreeBSD or the BSD's in general.

Thanks,
Samuel
 
There is no construct that will allow you to install 32 bit and 64 bit packages at the same time, like the multi-arch option Debian has for example. A relatively simple way would be to create a 32 bit jail and build your things in there.
 
Best practice to me seems to create a base installation of i386 under some path on the amd64 (you could compile world with TARGET and DESTDIR set, or just unpack the i386 installation packages from CD), then chroot(8) into that path and do the build as normal.
You will need to mount devfs there
mount -t devfs devfs /your-i386-tree/dev
and probably a few other minor gotchas, but nothing really difficult.
 
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