Maintain i386 world, kernel, ports on amd64 box

[Uniballer]

I have a site where there is an i386 box (releng/9.1 on an older Pentium 4 with 1GB ECC RAM, 80GB IDE disk, several PCI cards, etc) doing environmental control chores. Software is up to date, and it does the job well, but the machine is really slow to maintain itself (building 9.1-RC3 world from scratch takes about 8 hours). I have a newer i5-2500 amd64 machine on site with plenty of disk space, and would like to be able to build world, kernel and ports for the i386 machine as needed. It is easy enough to set up an i386 jail on an amd64 box, and svn works fine, but # make installworld does not work in the jail due to filesystem flags and the inability to change them from inside the jail. For the same reason, I'll bet freebsd-update wouldn't work either. So how do you maintain world in the i386 jail on the amd64 machine?

I imagine VirtualBox would work if there is no other way. Is there another way?

 

[kpa]

It's possible to cross-compile i386 world (and kernel) on amd64:

# make buildworld installworld TARGET=i386 DESTDIR=/jails/i386jail

 

[wblock@]

VirtualBox would allow testing before rolling out the new system to the actual hardware. Could also be a convenient backup.