Do you will upgrade to release 15? Or what is your general major version upgrade scheme?

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PeterXie

Talking frankly, so far 14.x is quite stable and performs very well and v15 may not fix the issue of suspending/resume for my laptop. Thanks for your advice in advance.
 
I think the release engineering team (specifically Colin Percival) does a great job of trying to make every release as stable as possible along with security patch updates. Don't hold yourself back just because of what others perceive as "more stable" releases.
 
I'm still relatively new to freebsd, so moving from 14.x to 15 will be my first major upgrade. I have a test system on which I will try the update before getting started with my main laptop.

Anyways, I'm not worried at all because of ZFS, BEs and so on.
 
15 brings in a modern Kerberos among other improvements.

Too many people feel updating or applying patches break things. This is probably due to their experience with Microsoft Windows, which breaks pretty much every Patch Tuesday. Other operating systems aren't this sloppy.

An extreme example is one user/company who hadn't updated since FreeBSD 6. It running well for them except they couldn't build ports. They tried to rope me into a contract a couple of years ago to maintain their aging infrastructure because the guy who did left for another job.

Another extreme example was at $JOB - 1. They had some ancient hardware that management didn't want to spend the money to replace. The hardware and software had long been out of production. (It was a different group than ours that owned the hardware.) Eventually there were three sites in the world and finally one site (ours) that ran the old hardware. They bought the hardware from the other two sites for spares and scoured EBay for more parts. I heard they retired the old hardware a year or two ago. Don't do this. It's risky and it's bad for your mental health.

Update to supported releases of whatever O/S you're running.
 
I always upgrade when the version I currently run is EOL at the earliest.

Especially in this case 15 seems to bring some major changes, so I expect it to still have some flaws left at official release. That ain't no malice insinuation. It's "natural" that anything finally is released from the laboratories into the wild have some flaws, or even bugs, left.
By all my experience with FreeBSD so far the responsible persons in charge rather postpone a release date than ship anything that even remotely smells like crap.
After all this ain't no consumer's gizmo garbage from some greedy joint-stock company staying in schedule for the christmas sale whatever the cost.😎

I don't like stress. I had more than enough of that unhealthy useless crap in my life. If 15 would be released in April or May next year, it was completely fine to me. 😎✌️😌
To me at the moment there is no need for an upgrade at all.
Everything runs fine.
Neither I want to stress the developers.
I prefer things run reliably, stable, as usual, and relaxed instead of nervously stay on guard for every new version, and to get it always immediately, and then to deal with flaws, patches, bugs, or maybe even mess up my machines, because I was too hasty, missed reading some important point in the docu...
☮️🇯🇲😌

Plus I don't want to stress the servers even more by all those who must have new releases within the very first minutes. (Is there bedroll camping on the internet's sidewalk? 😁)
I will wait at least three months.
I always watch the forums and mailing lists carefully to be prepared for any "surprises", and to know how to deal with them in advance if there are any. :cool:
 
I've never had any problems updating the system to major versions. My previous server was installed with version 9.x and I kept it up to version 13.x. On the even older server, I started with version 6.x, but I reinstalled the system after each version. I didn't know about freebsd-update, at least not until version 7.x.

What scares me a little is the new pkgbase update method, which I haven't read anything about yet. ZFS is also new to me, and I don't have much knowledge about it either.

I expect, as always, that I'll be able to update the system without causing much damage. Instead, I'll try an update in a new virtual machine before updating the server and the work virtual machine I'm currently using.
 
Maturin said:
I always upgrade when the version I currently run is EOL at the earliest.
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Exactly. I will stay on 13.x as long as there is a supported 13.x version. Then I will switch to 14.x, and stay on that as long as there is support, which I think is until 2028 or thereabouts. Not clear yet whether I will move to 15.x ever; that depends on whether by then pkgbase and the foundation's newfound love for desktop/laptop support make it a desirable option for a server-class machine.
 
I'm playing around with the alpha versions on my (old) laptop.
Improvements:
- faster boot compared to 14.x
- battery life. In the 14.x I was getting ~2h30m, in 15 alphaX I'm getting more than 3h.
 
I run/maintain my own 2 FreeBSD (VPS) servers, and I am kinda proud of that feat. Because of this, and the fact that I'm a systems administrator by trade... well, I take my update / security schemes quite seriously, even though we're basically talking hobby servers.

So.. both servers have been build from the ground up (= using the source & Ports collection). And both servers are somewhat each others test case ;)

When it comes to 3rd party software (Apache, Postfix, etc.) my main server is also the "test environment": ports get build on my main server using Portmaster & my private support scripts, then stored in a (private) repository which is used by my 2nd server to install / update the build software. However, this update is done only once per week, so after I made sure that there are no issues on my main server.

But OS updates... these go the other way around. I maintain the source tree on my main server, and provide it over NFS to my backup server. So once it's time to update I "lock / freeze" the source tree, then update my backup server by building the world & kernel. After that I check it out for approx. one or two weeks before I eventually also upgrade my main server.

This method works perfectly for me.
 
I'm still using 14.3 mainly, but I'm booting 15-ALPHA on a separate drive and updating it regularly for testing and comparison. pkg upgrade is working very nicely so far. I'm using UFS as always.

The only downside is that the nvidia driver is causing more noticeable interference with the motherboard audio, but I think that issue is addressed elsewhere in the forums. I will upgrade when 14.x reaches end-of-life unless I feel 15.x is better.
 
I've not had significant upgrade issues in years. Now I do wait a few days before doing so but I've also upgraded right at the announcement.

When I ran a web dev company, we had a test server and also waited a couple of weeks to do any upgrades.
 
The question I'm asking myself (perhaps someone has already answered it):
I'm upgrading my FreeBSD releases with
(Example)
freebsd-update -r 15.0-RELEASE upgrade
Click to expand...
from my current release:
FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE-p3

Will the system switch directly to PKG-Base?
I don't think so, but I'd like more information.
It's still too early, and I assume that specific information regarding this major change will be available.
Best regards and thanks to the developers for their work.
 
cy@ said:
Too many people feel updating or applying patches break things. This is probably due to their experience with Microsoft Windows, which breaks pretty much every Patch Tuesday. Other operating systems aren't this sloppy.
Click to expand...
There is this thing called rolling linux distros. Im still traumatized by broken grub updates and dead xorg servers. I dont want to go back. :)
 
Major upgrades are a primary reason I use ZFS even on single disk systems. Very easy to create a new BE, chroot stuff and upgrade completely (base and packages) into the new BE. Activate new BE single reboot and you're up and running (hopefully). If it fails, trivial to roll back to the working BE.
From what I've seen/read, I think going from 14.x to 15.x will be less traumatic than the 4.x to 5.x upgrade. (just my opinion).
 
cy@ said:
Too many people feel updating or applying patches break things. This is probably due to their experience with Microsoft Windows, which breaks pretty much every Patch Tuesday. Other operating systems aren't this sloppy.
Click to expand...
This was my early experience of FreeBSD, having started with FreeBSD 14.1:
Useradd said:
I didn't have this problem in FreeBSD 14.1, but upgrading to, or installing 14.2 resulted in the infamous 'black screen'. According to the logs the module appeared to have been compiled for 14.1, and was not accepted.

Having no display and no idea what causes it or how to fix it is a big problem for a newcomer! I am very grateful for all the help in the forums.
Click to expand...
I've been very cautious about updating ever since. I wouldn't know about Windows, but one of the two things I like about Linux Mint is that it just works. So does OpenBSD. I use FreeBSD now because it helps me learn so much about how operating systems work, and it lets me be in full control.
 
freethread said:
On the even older server, I started with version 6.x, but I reinstalled the system after each version. I didn't know about freebsd-update, at least not until version 7.x.
Click to expand...
AFAIR freebsd-update arrived in 6.2? But I also didn't use it for a long time, being building everything from src, and I even started with using pkgs vs all built from ports ~10
 
Well, I never wait too long for an upgrade, even major. Some people wait for the XX.1-RELEASE. I don't.
More time you wait, more problems you may have to upgrade. It's better to face them soon than late.

After all, if you use zfs, you can go back very easily.

Real difficulties come typically from ports upgrade (and it's mandatory to upgrade ports when entering in a new major release). freebsd-update is pretty sure itself. Never had bad surprise from it.

As far as I know, 15.0-RELEASE won't switch automatically to pkgbase. It's an option.
That said, soon or late, we'll all use pkgbase. I will wait a little for that.
 
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