freebsd-update upgrade -r 7.4-RELEASE-p12

[Mark Felder]

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013, at 8:36, Eduardo Morras wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Oct 2013 21:32:39 -0600 (MDT)
> Mike Brown <mike at skew.org> wrote:
> 
> > alexus wrote:
> > > ok, I just did fetch & install and got bumped from p5 to p9
> > > 
> > > # uname -a
> > > FreeBSD XX.XXXXX.org 7.4-RELEASE-p9 FreeBSD 7.4-RELEASE-p9 #0: Mon Jun 11
> > > 19:47:58 UTC 2012
> > > root at amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
> > >  amd64
> > > #
> > > 
> > > can I take it all the way to -p12?
> > 
> > -p10 through -p12 probably didn't involve any kernel changes. Bumping the 
> > reported patchlevel isn't considered important enough to warrant building a 
> > new kernel.
> 
> That there's no kernel changes doesn't mean that uname -a info is not
> updated. 

You are incorrect. The output of uname -a is taken from the kernel and
cannot be updated without installing a new kernel.

The good news is that FreeBSD 10 will ship with a new utility called
freebsd-version which will provide a better way of identifying if your
system is up to date.

>From the commit message:

Introduce the /libexec/freebsd-version script, which is intended to be
used by auditing tools to determine the userland patch level when it
differs from what `uname -r` reports.  This can happen when the system
is kept up-to-date using freebsd-update and the last SA did not touch
the kernel, or when a new kernel has been installed but the system has
not yet rebooted.

http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/freebsd-version/


By the way, it will be /bin/freebsd-version as it has been relocated
since the import into head.