The best approach to upgrade to freebsd 10 ?

[Thomas Mueller]

> A few days ago I did the (freebsd-update) upgrade of my VPS. I've been
> using FreeBSD since 4.8 and been running various releases and doing
> upgrades since then. This last upgrade (9.2-->10.0) was probably the worst,
> though I accept the blame for not reading /usr/src/UPDATING carefully. Here
> are the problems I ran into:
        
> 1) unable to boot after first stage of upgrade with "mounting ufs... error
> 19". This is explained in UPDATING entry 20110424 - basically, disk device
> names have been changed and the system was not able to find boot partition
> ad0s1a as it was renamed to ada0s1a. This is an old entry, but there were
> symbolic links to old device names throughout 9.x enabling the old
> configuration to work which I guess was removed on 20130404 ("Legacy ATA
> stack... completely removed from sources").

> 2) network not working. I can't find this exactly in the UPDATING notes,
> but there was a lot of talk on Xen-related changes so I guess it was not
> much of a surprise. My NIC was renamed from re0 to xn0 hosing the
> ifconfig_re0 entries in rc.conf and ipfw "via" rules.

> 3) not actually a problem per se, but building a custom kernel with
> IPFIREWALL_FORWARD option I was using before failed with "unknown option".
> Again, this is in UPDATING entry 20121102 - option removed, functionality
> enabled by default. Finally!

> So take care if you share any of the above. 1) and 2) are especially
> problematic if you are running upgrade remotely.

> Regards,
--
> Nino

You mention re0 being renamed to xn0.

I couldn't find any device xn or xn0 in FreeBSD 11-current, though I found xe and xen.

I figured if it were in 10-STABLE, it would also be in 11-HEAD.

For a moment, I thought maybe the reason why I couldn't connect Ethernet on MSI Z77 MPOWER motherboard was needing to use a driver other than re, but nothing so simple.

There is still device re.

Did you make a typo with xn0?

I also wonder if the best way to upgrade to FreeBSD 10 is to jump to 11-HEAD, am seriously considering that.

Tom