I cross graded a laptop from i686 to x86_64 yesterday using dnf and it
went pretty well without a reinstall. It also ran fine using an x86_64
kernel with i686 user space during the transition.
I noticed that at least with using --forcearch=x86_64 that installing
two packages that had names differing only in arch was a problem, even
when there shouldn't have been file conflicts. So that to get an x86_64
kernel installed, I needed to install a different version than any of
the installed i686 kernels.
Initially I installed an x86_64 kernel and then booted into that. I assumed
that x86_64 user space wouldn't work with an i686 kernel. (Though I didn't
test that to be sure.) I didn't want an upgrade failing part way through,
since it is a pain to clean up after that.
Then I got of list of i686 packages (skipping noarch packages). After playing
around with how to get dnf to do the update in one go (since it seemed
likely to break things to have i686 libraries removed early) I found that
using yum shell and swap worked.
So you build a file with a swap line for each i686 to x86_64 conversion and
then run yum shell with --forcearch=x86_64 specify that file and all the
x86_64 packages get installed before the i686 packages get removed.
I ran the process using screen to protect against desktop crashes and
script to keep a record of what was done to check over afterwards. But
it ran to completion without problems.
wine is a special case. It couldn't be reinstalled in the mass cut over
because it has dependencies on both x86_64 and i686 libs. So I had to
reinstall afterwards.
I'm not sure how dnf decides what the arch is. I still needed to use
--forcearch when running an x86_64 kernel and an i686 user space. I
rebooted after the userspace update and was able to reinstall wine
properly without having to use --forcearch any more.
So far things seem to be working normally, though in theory there might
be some data that needs to get updated for an application.
This went a lot smoother than I was expecting. I have had worse experiences
updating after mass rebuilds than this one.
Most of the articles on switching arches without full reinstalls are very
old and describe more complicated processes. So I wanted to get something
out there for other people that might have systems they want to switch
over.
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