Dual-booting amd64 and 32 bit x86?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Philip A. Chapman wrote:

>I have ordered a eMachines M6809 and expect to take delivery on it later
>this week.  To begin with, I'll probably install the 32 bit x86 version
>of Fedora and run that on it as I often use VMWare to run various
>version of windows.  I'm making the only slightly educated assumption
>that I will have to run the 32 bit kernel so that VMWare's kernel
>modules will work with it.

32bit VMware will not work under a 64bit OS kernel, as VMware 
uses vm86, which is not available in long mode on AMD64 CPUs at 
all, not even for 32bit apps.  You can boot a 32bit OS on the 
AMD64 CPU however, and run 32bit VMware in it.

You might want to contact VMware Inc. to find out what their 
plans are for 64bit VMware (if any) however, in case they have 
come up with an alternate method to replace the functionality 
obtained via vm86.

>However, I'd like to play with the 64 but stuff too.  I think
>that the best way to do this is to have separate partition(s)
>set up so that I can dual-boot between the 32 bit and 64 bit
>versions of Fedora.  Is this the case?  Is there a better way?

That's the easy way to do it.  I share /home and /tmp between all 
OS installs on a single box, and it works fairly well.  You might 
have conflicts with some ~/.<foo> files however if any apps 
change versions between OS releases and have incompatible config 
file formats.

TTYL


-- 
Mike A. Harris        ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer   -   X11 Developer   -   Red Hat