freebsd-update on a 8.0 rootzfs system

[Dan Naumov]

Hello folks

I have a 8.0 system that uses zfsroot and gptzfsboot. It uses the
GENERIC kernel and the only thing that had to be manually recompiled
is obviously the bootloader, to enable zfs boot support, other then
that, the system is using stock 8.0 binaries. Since fully rebuilding
world and kernel on this system is a 5 hour process, I would very much
like to use freebsd-update and I wanted someone to clarify the
utility's behaviour. If I run freebsd-update on this system, what will
it do when it detects that the bootloader binaries do not match those
of stock 8.0-RELEASE? Will it:

1) Ignore the changed/recompiled bootloader files completely, only
updating the binaries whose checksums it can recognize. This behaviour
is alright for updating within 8.0, updating for release errata, but
would cause some problems updating to 8.1 and further, since 8.1 will
have zfs capable bootloader by default and having freebsd-update
always completely ignore a system component that has once been
recompiled sounds a bit silly.

2) Happily update the system, overwrite my custom compiled bootloader,
forcing me to manually rebuild the bootloader again before I reboot
the system. This I guess would actually be the desired behaviour.


- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov