Root-on-ZFS upgrade question

[Mike Clarke]

On Saturday 01 Nov 2014 10:25:04 Matthew Seaman wrote:

> If your original system had been maintained via freebsd-update(8)
> you could just use that to upgrade to 10.1-RELEASE in place -- when
> it tells you to reboot, just run freebsd-update again.

I think the second run of freebsd-update needs to be applied after 
booting into the new environment so do it after the beadm activate 
step.

An alternative approach is to activate the new environment immediately 
after creating it and then reboot and upgrade the new environment to 
rev. 10 in the "conventional" way.

The chroot approach means that you can sort out upgrading the OS and 
reinstalling all the ports at leisure without disrupting your working 
system until you're ready for the final switch over. I normally use 
this approach for major port upgrades and dot level system upgrades 
within the same release level but I had problems with upgrading from 
9.1 to 10.0 due, I assune, to incompatibilities between the 10.0 
applications and the running 9.1 kernel.

If you want to keep the option of reverting to your 9.x system after 
the upgrade then you need to make sure that all OS release level 
dependant directories like most of /usr and /usr/local are contained 
in the boot environment. On the other hand you can save disk space and  
download time by placing /usr/ports/distfiles outside of the boot 
environment. You will probably also want to keep /var/log, /var/mail 
and application databases, e.g. /var/db/mysql, outside of the boot 
environment.

-- 
Mike Clarke