upgrade from 8.2 to 9.0

[Mike Clarke]

On Saturday 14 January 2012, Dick Hoogendijk wrote:

> My system is running ZFS on root now, so I would very much like to
> hear if the binary upgrade through freebsd-update works well for such
> a system (w/ zfs on root). I don't want to get stuck with a system
> that won't boot again because something goes wrong with zfs.

Have you considerd using manageBE 
<http://anonsvn.h3q.com/projects/freebsd-patches/wiki/manageBE>? With 
this tool you can set up cloned alternative Boot-Environments (BE) so 
that you can go back to your old BE if the new one doesn't work.

I'm in the process of upgrading to 9.0 and taking the opportunity of 
changing over to ZFS. I needed to re-arrange my filesystem structure to 
boot from tank/ROOT/someBEname/ instead of tank/ (and make sure the 
mountpoints of any descendent file systems are suitably adjusted) but 
it was worth the effort.

I installed 9.0-RC2 from the ISO onto a spare drive so I haven't done an 
8 to 9 binary upgrade but I have used freebsd-update to upgrade from 
9.0-RC2 to 9.0-RELEASE and that went through without any problems. 

-- 
Mike Clarke