13.2 -> 15.0

I think you can miss minor revisions, so 14.1 -> 14.3 should be OK. But it's your data and time if it goes wrong. And make sure you do an extra freebsd-update after the 14.3 upgrades to ensure you get the freebsd-update changes that stop your 15.0 upgrade going wrong (referring to your recent 15.0 upgrade issues).

Have you got another computer/VM? Try installing 13.x on there and enough of your environment to test it works and then give it a whirl upgrading to 14.x (you could try directly to 14.3).

Ultimately, though, I don't think anyone is going to give you a cast-iron guarantee that any upgrade (especially short-cuts, and upgrading on older systems) will work on your system.

And even if you try it on a test system, that's not a guarantee that something won't go wrong on the "real" system, but it's still worthwhile experimenting on another guinea-pig system.
 
I have plenty of disks with FreeBSD installed. That's one of the benefits of Ventoy because I can create numerous partition and as many FreeBSD installations as I want.

At the moment I'm trying to get from 14.0 to 14.1 but have a recurring problem with freebsd-version -u showing 14.0-RELEASE-p11. The other options show 14.1-RELEASE-p7. I've run freebsd-update install numerous times including reboots. That is after doing a '-r 14.1-RELEASE upgrade.

What is causing the 'userland' value to show a backlevel?
 
I would backup /etc , take base.txz kernel.txz from 15.0 release untar it and install the bootloader. Done.
Then pkg-static install -f pkg ; pkg update -f ; pkg upgrade. Done , from any release directly to 15.0
 
I appreciate the suggestion, but I would actually like to know why freebsd-version -u shows 14.0-RELEASE-p11, which looks like the update was not fully made.
 
we have a 13.2 box that we need to upgrade to 15.0 eventually. the main problem is that we have ezjail thin jails that we put in jail.conf, and upgrading those is a weird process. life is pain.
 
would actually like to know why freebsd-version -u shows 14.0-RELEASE-p11, which looks like the update was not fully made.
Yes, that looks like the userland part hasn't upgraded, so you will need to try and do the upgrade again or force it through. But I'm not sure how you do that exactly. --currently-running?
 
but I think after a major upgrade, there is that third install run recommended
Two times for minor version upgrades and three for major version upgrades. The third and final install of a major version upgrade removes all the old files and libraries from the previous versions. This is why you need to reinstall/rebuild your ports/packages in between the second and third install stages. After the third one the libraries from the previous version are removed, which typically means your installed ports/packages will fail unless they've been specifically linked against the system libraries of the new version.
 
Two times for minor version upgrades and three for major version upgrades. The third and final install of a major version upgrade removes all the old files and libraries from the previous versions.
Yep, this.
I think it's actually "safe" to run freebsd-update install until it comes back with "nothing to do", that means you ran it enough times.
 
I think it's actually "safe" to run freebsd-update install until it comes back with "nothing to do", that means you ran it enough times.
Yep. That's usually what I do too. And during the install phase and various reboots I disable everything that's not strictly needed to boot and login. I'll enable everything again once I'm completely done with the upgrade (for both the base and ports/packages).
 
Yep. That's usually what I do too. And during the install phase and various reboots I disable everything that's not strictly needed to boot and login. I'll enable everything again once I'm completely done with the upgrade (for both the base and ports/packages).
It sounds like we've run into similar problems in the past :) That's why I like using BEs: trivial to disable things like drm kmods and reboot and completely upgrade then load by hand to verify then reenable.
 
If I wanted to get from 14.1-RELEASE to 15.0-RELEASE what would be the minimum freebsd-updates involved?
Do I need to go 14.1 -> 14.2 -> 14.3 -> 15.0?
You could try the Mark Felder method of manually updating FreeBSD without using freebsd-update. I would use this method to take you from 14.1 to 14.3 because it's quick and you'll be on the same release version (14.x). But then use freebsd-update to upgrade from 14.3 to 15.0 as there may be changes (14.x to 15.x) that freebsd-update should handle correctly that Mark's method may not. Whichever way you decide to go make sure that you back everything up first.
 
In future I will run uname -UKr after each step to make sure things are progressing properly.

I never really appreciated the update process properly and usually avoided the task altogether because of various errors.

This particular experience has been something of a learning curve.
 
I never really appreciated the update process properly and usually avoided the task altogether because of various errors.
It's always worked well in my experience (from 9.x maybe earlier but my memory isn't great). But I only use FreeBSD for servers - so conservative hardware, wired connections, no GUI etc., no sound cards, so a lot fewer moving parts.
 
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