upgrading from 5.4-RELEASE-p4 to 5.4-RELEASE-p5

[lars]

Louis LeBlanc wrote:
> There was a new security announcement a couple days ago regarding the
> devfs subsystem in FreeBSD.  The announcement is here:
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-05:17.devfs.asc
> 
> My question is regarding the upgrade and patch description.  I am
> running 5.4_RELEASE-p4.  The alert suggests either patching and
> rebuilding the kernel or upgrading to 5.4-RELEASE-p5.
"Upgrading" to 5-STABLE or RELENG_5_4
means synchronising your source with one of these CVS tagged branches 
and then rebuilding your system.
In this particular case only the kernel really needs to be rebuilt and
reinstalled.
Some people however prefer to always rebuild the kernel and world
to ensure synchronicity of the two.

   If I decide to
> upgrade my source, would it be sufficient (and safe) to just rebuild
> the kernel, or do I still need to rebuild world?
In this case, you could do with only rebuilding and installing the kernel.

> The only files changed between my last build and this one are
>  src/UPDATING
>  src/sys/conf/newvers.sh
>  src/sys/fs/devfs/devfs_vnops.c
> 
> And for such a small change (I checked the patch, it's literally a 2
> line change - sanity check of parameters for the defvs_mknod() call -
> plus commentary), would it really be necessary to go through the
> mergemaster process?  (from my POV, this is the most tedious and error
> prone part of the whole process).
No, here it is not necessary.