Updating from 11.3-stable to 12.1-stable?

[Bob Willcox]

Thanks to all that have posted suggestions on what to do / how to proceed.
I thought that I probably should provide some additional information about the
system in question.

First of all, I have been updating it from src right along. Both the kernel and
user level programs. Also, given the compact form factor of the system and that
all of the drives in it are being used either by the root filesystems or the data
storage itself. Here is the zpool output 

root at vader:1 /root> zpool status
  pool: stor
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0 days 02:21:12 with 0 errors on Wed Apr 22 05:23:49 2020
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        stor        ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz1-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            da0     ONLINE       0     0     0
            da1     ONLINE       0     0     0
            da2     ONLINE       0     0     0
            da3     ONLINE       0     0     0
            da4     ONLINE       0     0     0
            da5     ONLINE       0     0     0
            da6     ONLINE       0     0     0
            da7     ONLINE       0     0     0
        logs
          ada0s1    ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          ada0s2    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

  pool: zroot
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0 days 00:00:20 with 0 errors on Wed Apr 22 03:02:58 2020
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
          nvd0p4    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

So as you can see, zroot it on an NVMe m.2 device plugged into the motherboard and
all of the other devices are being used by the stor pool.

>From the description in the freebsd-update man page it appears that it doesn't
support updating a STABLE or CURRENT level, only a RELEASE level so I assume that
I will need to be updating via source. I suspect that I could also reinstall 12.1
over the existing NVMe drive as well, if that would be the most reliable approach.

Note that the data in the stor zpool is truly a complete backup of my primary 
server and I could recreate it, but it's quite a lot of data and I'd really rather
not have to do that.

Thanks,
Bob

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 03:01:11PM -0500, Bob Willcox wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> What is the best way to update a system from 11.3-stable to 12.1-stable? This system
> is a backup file server that I could reinstall if necessary, but I'd really like to
> avoid having to do that.
> 
> Any tips/ideas on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Bob
> 
> -- 
> Bob Willcox    | It's possible that the whole purpose of your life is to
> bob at immure.com | serve as a warning to others.
> Austin, TX     |
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

-- 
Bob Willcox    | It's possible that the whole purpose of your life is to
bob at immure.com | serve as a warning to others.
Austin, TX     |