problems upgrading from 7.2-RELEASE-p8 to 7.4 or 9.0-RELEASE

[Jamie Paul Griffin]

[ Bas Smeelen wrote on Fri 12.Oct'12 at 11:02:47 +0200 ]

> On 10/12/2012 10:53 AM, Jamie Paul Griffin wrote:
> > [ Greg Larkin wrote on Thu 11.Oct'12 at 20:49:19 -0400 ]
> >
> >> Hi Stuart,
> >>
> >> If you click the link in this mailing list article
> >> (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2010-July/218554.html),
> >> then follow the rest of the threaded messages, you should be able fix
> >> the problem once you upgrade to 7.4.
> >>
> >> The issue is that freebsd-update cannot update the ld-elf.so.1 binary
> >> on a running system, so after the upgrade to 7.4 (or higher), the
> >> system is not completely updated.
> >>
> >> This message
> >> (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2010-July/218884.html)
> >> has a fix, but it involves booting from a liveCD and replacing the
> >> binary manually.
> > Would it be easier to do an update by building from source? I've never used freebsd-update myself so not had to troubleshoot these issues before.
> 
> That's probably the best way.
> 
> Bit I am wondering about this.
> I upgraded several systems (physical and virtual machines) with 
> freebsd-update from 7.1 -> 7.3 -> 8.1 -> 8.3 and also one system from 7.1 -> 
> 7.4 (with custom kernels) and did not encounter this. Did I just get lucky then?

I couldn't comment on the freebsd-update(8) procedure as I've never used it. But I'd personally upgrade the system by building from source. You can then easily integrate your custom kernel and I would *imagine* you'd avoid the issues you've encountered so far. 

Make sure you read /usr/src/UPDATING thoroughly, and also check your customer kernel options. Some changes have been made to more recent versions of FreeBSD, such as the ata(4) driver. I believe in the past certain elements could be (and still can be) added in a modular fasion, explicitly setting each element. Now, you only need to have: device scbus, device ata and options ATA_CAM. Already present in the GENERIC kernel config now. See man 4 ata for details. I hope i've got that right, hopefully others will correct my comments if necessary but in any case, reading the appropriate files will provide all the information needed. For example: /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES and /usr/src/sys/{i386,amd64}/NOTES have more information about kernel options that might be helpful and of interest to you.