freebsd-update not updating kernel?

[Ian Jefferson]

> On Sep 22, 2016, at 7:01 AM, Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve at sohara.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 22 Sep 2016 06:14:28 -0400
> Ian Jefferson <ijeff at sandbox.ca> wrote:
> 
>> I was having a similar issue with freebsd-update not being aware (able?)
>> to patch up to 9.3-RELEASE-p45.
> 
> 	Not all updates change the kernel so it is very possible for the
> kernel version (which uname reports) to be older than the latest update
> installed. In 10.3 there's freebsd-version which reports the system version
> as distinct from the kernel version to resolve this problem, I'm not sure
> if it has been backported to 9.3 though - try it and see.
> 

Thanks,

It doesn’t seem like freebsd-version is backported to 9.3 but I’m not sure that would fix the freebsd-update problem nor the lsof issue either.

I also found this:

"The updates distributed by freebsd-update do not always involve the kernel. It is not necessary to rebuild a custom kernel if the kernel sources have not been modified by freebsd-update install. However, freebsd-update will always update/usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh. The current patch level, as indicated by the -p number reported by uname -r, is obtained from this file. Rebuilding a custom kernel, even if nothing else changed, allows uname to accurately report the current patch level of the system. This is particularly helpful when maintaining multiple systems, as it allows for a quick assessment of the updates installed in each one. “

here:  https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html

Indeed it looks to me like /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh on my system “knows” that I am at patch level 45 but freebsd-update doesn’t nor does uname.  I think you are saying that uname get’s its information from the kernel but that is contradicted by the handbook points above so I’m unclear and regardless freebsd-update seems broken in this patch.

My newvers.sh file contains the following:

TYPE="FreeBSD"
REVISION="9.3"
BRANCH="RELEASE-p45"
if [ "X${BRANCH_OVERRIDE}" != "X" ]; then
        BRANCH=${BRANCH_OVERRIDE}
fi
RELEASE="${REVISION}-${BRANCH}"
VERSION="${TYPE} ${RELEASE}”

I suppose the ultimate answer is we need to move off 9.3 since it is just about EOL anyway but I wonder… if freebsd-update is confused will it perform the upgrade correctly?

Ian