Upgrading FreeBSD to a new release

[Kent Stewart]

On Sunday 06 June 2004 02:55 pm, Roman Kennke wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > > > One thing, that is making me _not_ using FreeBSD is, that I see
> > > > no way to easily upgrade from, say 5.1 to 5.2 (just an
> > > > example),
>
> ..
>
> > > Apart from that i updated my systems many times, without being in
> > > single user mode, with an ssh connection.
> >
> > This doesn't work on the upgrade to 5.2 from 5.1. You have to boot
> > into single user mode to do the installworld. You have incompatible
> > features at this upgrade.
>
> Exactly these kinds of hassles I don't want. I am wondering - FreeBSD
> has built such a nice thing like the ports system. It's a work of
> genius. Only that the install/upgrade process of the system itself is
> completely different (and not very convenient IMO). Is it not
> possible to 'port' the System stuff into the ports system (or a
> different ports system, say, the 'system ports' or something like
> that). Just an idea.
>
> Ok, are there other ways? Isn't there a script, which places the new
> archives over the old ones, and removes the stuff, that's left from
> the old system? Or is this a too-difficult task?
>

The problem with 5.1 > 5.2 is called statfs. See, /usr/src/UPDATING. It 
will run with a new kernel and not the old kernel. If you do an 
installworld before you do an installkernel, you have to use the fixit 
CD to fix it. For a while, they thought you had to do a clean install. 

I have no idea what happens if you boot to a 5.2 kernel with a 5.1 
userland. 

The ports are entirely different because they don't deal with basic 
things such as fs'es. Somewhere in the 5.2 chain is the port problem 
with pthreads. You can count on rebuilding all of your ports that use 
pthreads. Portupgrade does a lot of what you talk about but I always 
use puf and it avoids moving the libraries in to the compat directory.

Kent

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html