Re: 14.2-RELEASE buildworld failure

On Jan 24, 2025, at 4:48 am, Scott Bennett <bennett@sdf.org> wrote:

>> Odhiambo Washington <odhiambo@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> So you can start with:
>> 1.
>> https://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/freebsd-13-released-how-to-update-upgrade-freebsd-12-to-13/,
>> then proceed to
>> 2. https://www.debugpoint.com/upgrade-to-freebsd-14/
> 
>     Thanks for the URLs, which I will probably take a look at for ideas, but
> an upgrade to 13.x is, as stated above, something I hope to avoid even as a
> temporary measure for fear of getting stuck at that stage and being left with
> no option but installing from scratch, which would cost me all of my
> configuration choices and probably leave me with an unusable system.  That is
> what happened on the laptop when I "upgraded" to 13.3-RELEASE.  I do try to
> learn from encounters with pitfalls.  FWIW, 13.x has no new features that I
> have any need of, while 14.x may.  In any case, I can't remain on 12.4, even
> though it has been a very reliable release.


I believe the guaranteed tested upgrade path is from FreeBSD X to FreeBSD X+1.  It may work to jump over an interim release, but given your issues up to now, you may have hit the corner case where going from 12.4 -> 14.2 won't work and you have to upgrade via 13.

If you are worried about getting stuck on 13.x, and you are using ZFS, have you tried upgrading via boot environments?  I have upgraded via beinstall.sh(8) for a while now and have been very happy with it.  (I use it in my standard update workflow.)  After you run buildworld and buildkernel as normal, you run beinstall.sh (which lives in /usr/src/tools/build) to install to a new boot environment, which is also enabled on reboot.  You can reboot into the new system just by rebooting.  If it fails, you can select the previous working boot environment to boot into your previous working system.

So long as you don't upgrade your pool at the 13.x stage you should be able to revert back to your existing 12.4 system by reactivating that boot environment.  If upgrading to 13.x works, you can repeat the process in the 13.x boot environment to upgrade to 14.x.  When you're happily at 14.x, you can delete the interim 13.x boot environment.

Cheers,

Paul.