freebsd-update to 9.2-RELEASE-p8 loop

[Paul Mather]

On Jun 10, 2014, at 3:08 PM, Royce Williams <royce at tycho.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Royce Williams <royce at tycho.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 10:05 AM, Michael W. Lucas
>> <mwlucas at michaelwlucas.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 07:53:15PM +0200, Kurt Jaeger wrote:
>>>> Hi!
>>>> 
>>>>> I used freebsd-update to update from 9.2-RELEASE-p7 to 9.2-RELEASE-p8
>>>>> and rebooted.
>>>>> 
>>>>> After reboot, uname -a shows 9.2-RELEASE-p7, but I've seen this before
>>>>> and consider it normal.
>>>> 
>>>> p8 did not touch the kernel, therefore there is no update in the uname output.
>>>> 
>>>> Why it again and again updates linker.hints, I don't know.
>>> 
>>> linker.hints should be added to /etc/freebsd-update.conf IgnoreFiles, i.e.:
>>> 
>>> IgnorePaths /boot/kernel/linker.hints
>>> 
>>> linker.hints is dynamically generated, and freebsd-update shouldn't
>>> touch it. Yes, it's a bug.
>> 
>> More background in this forums thread:
>> 
>> https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?&t=1362
>> 
>> Also, I've found that just adding the IgnorePaths line may be
>> necessary, but is not sufficient.  I have added that line, but
>> freebsd-update continues to detect linker.hints as a needed update:
>> 
>> $ grep linker /etc/freebsd-update.conf
>> IgnorePaths /boot/kernel/linker.hints
>> 
>> $ sudo freebsd-update fetch
>> Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 5 mirrors found.
>> Fetching metadata signature for 8.4-RELEASE from update4.freebsd.org... done.
>> Fetching metadata index... done.
>> Inspecting system... done.
>> Preparing to download files... done.
>> 
>> The following files will be updated as part of updating to 8.4-RELEASE-p12:
>> /boot/kernel/linker.hints
> 
> Better reference on freebsd-questions, but it raises more questions
> than it answers:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2014-May/257950.html


I was the person who kicked off that thread, but I am still 
experiencing the /boot/kernel/linker.hints update loop even after 
applying the kldxref errata update. :-(


> Specifically, multiple users appear to still be experiencing this,
> even after applying the fix for this erratum:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-EN-14:04.kldxref.asc


I was wondering if the problem in my case might be related to having 
gone from -STABLE to -RELEASE at some point.  By habit, I am someone 
who prefers the build{world,kernel}/install{world,kernel} approach to 
updating FreeBSD.  However, I decided to switch over some systems to 
freebsd-update because there were going to be some admins new to 
FreeBSD that would be working with them.  These admins were used to 
RHEL, and so I thought they'd be more comfortable using freebsd-update 
(and pkg/poudriere) to keep the system up to date.

When I run "freebsd-update IDS" I get quite a few files listed as 
differing.  I believe a lot of these are files that just differ in the 
$FreeBSD svn IDs embedded in the files.  I had been using mergemaster 
to keep my configuration files up to date, but there doesn't seem to be 
an explicit mechanism with freebsd-update.

Given that "freebsd-update IDS" can work out which installed files are 
at odds with the canonical version being served by freebsd-update, is 
there any mechanism within freebsd-update to revert a specific local 
change to the current -RELEASE version?  (As I understand it, 
"rollback" is not the same in that it acts as a rollback/undo, not as a 
"replace with canonical version from repository".)

Cheers,

Paul.