I’ve always upgraded my Fedora laptop incrementally using the recommended tools (yum, preupgrade, fedup). For this reason, my initial decision to install i686 Fedora (back when 32-bit compatibility was important) has carried through, and I’ve always used i686 Fedora, even though the CPU supports x86_64.
Recently I wanted to try out Mezzano in a virtual machine, but it is x86_64-only. Obviously, virtualization tools don’t support running an x86_64 guest on an i686 host, so I shelved the experiment.
Then I found a use for Docker (testing Emacs HTTP authentication schemes), and wanted to try it out. But I ran into this surprising limitation: Docker is 64-bit only.
At this point I had two motivators to move to x86_64, but no desire to wipe my system. I discovered an interesting new term, “crossgrading”, when I found these instructions: Cross-grading from i686 to x86_64: it is possible (but unsupported). They were written for Fedora 14, but I decided to try them out on Fedora 22 (after backing up all my data).
Long story short, careful application of dnf download
and rpm --force
(and an rpm database rebuild) resulted in a still-working x86_64 Fedora 22 system, with no need to wipe the drive. I’m glad Roberto Ragusa took the time to write up those instructions, and I wanted to document that they roughly still apply, eight Fedora versions later.