Upgrade from 7.x to 8.x

[Uroš Gruber]

Hi,

I was looking for help about this on forum, but a the moment without
and luck. I would like to upgrade one of my servers from 7.2 release
to 8.1 stable. I've done this on other servers and all went well. But
with this one I can't get through. I'm testing all this in virtual
machine where I transfer all data from real server.

Here is my procedure

1. cd /usr/src
2. make update (using RELENG_8)
3. make cleanworld && make cleandir
4. make buildworld
5. make buildkernel

Through here everything works, but from now on I tried manny different
steps but unfortunately I can't make it work.

If I run make installkernel and reboot the server with single user a
new kernel loads ok the only problem I have is that some of  the
programs don't actually work. For example awk

/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: /lib/libm.so.5: version FBSD_1.0 required by /usr/bin/awk

same problem is with ps, more etc.

If I continue to run mergemaster and make installworld nothing really
works, because installworld throws me a bunch of errors because some
of the utilities needed does not work at all.

So I tried other method. After make installworld I put server in
single user mode without restarting (shutdown now). From there I can
continue with

7. mergemaster -p
8. make installworld
9. make delete-old
10. make delete-old-lib
11. mergemaster

Btw I tried reversing order of step 10 and 11 but it make no difference.

Then I reboot the machine and first it looks I'll done my job well but
right after it started complaining about the same thing as with awk
but now with ps etc. and then crash with kldload process. The only
thing that it works is single user mode.

Because of all the problems with buildworld stuff i tried to use
freebsd-update utility but this one failed even more. So I abandon
this idea completely.

I would appreciate some help to successfully upgrade this server.
Fresh install is at the moment no option. Server is running 7.2
release with amd64 kernel.

Best regards

Uros