Upgrade 7.4 to 9.1

Uniballer

Uniballer

I'm seriously contemplating trying a source upgrade on a small, slow machine running 7.4. If I build 9.1 world and kernel on a fast machine, and nc over tar'ed images of /usr/src and /usr/obj built on another machine, and do a # make installkernel KERNCONF=mumble will I be able to boot it in single user mode so I can # make installworld? I can # make distribution on the target machine. Then I will only need to add 2 user accounts and a few changes to /etc/rc.conf, and install a few ports.

What do you think?
 
No need to copy the files, just NFS mount /usr/src and /usr/obj (can be done read-only). You can then do the installworld/installkernel bit. Skip the booting to single user mode.
 
Alas, the 7.4 machine was built without NFS support.

I was concerned that if I attempted the # make installworld without having booted the 9.1 kernel first that at some point I would be trying to run a program built for 9.1 on the 7.4 kernel, and I'm not at all sure that will work. Will it?
 
It won't. Only very rarely do you specifically need to boot the new kernel prior to an installworld. It will be mentioned in /usr/src/UPDATING if that's the case.

In the past 15 years I can remember it happened once, when they moved from UFS1 to UFS2. Not booting the new kernel before installworld resulted in a non-booting system.
 
Code: 
mount -t ufs -o union /dev/da0 /usr  # or unionfs; /da0 having [FILE]/src[/FILE] and [FILE]/obj[/FILE]
Not sure of typo's, but I did a v6 > v9 upgrade (a thread is in the forums...) but it was very problematic (v9 installs checked for stuff present only in v8, maybe, I had
to do probably twenty workarounds, and it eventually completed, but took all day...)
 
It's generally recommended, and safer/saner, to do a stepwise upgrade:
  1. upgrade to latest 7.x release
  2. upgrade to 8.0
  3. upgrade to latest 8.x release
  4. upgrade to 9.0
  5. upgrade to latest 9.x release
And then upgrade/reinstall your ports.
 
phoenix said:
It's generally recommended, and safer/saner, to do a stepwise upgrade:

upgrade to latest 7.x release
upgrade to 8.0
upgrade to latest 8.x release
upgrade to 9.0
upgrade to latest 9.x release

And then upgrade/reinstall your ports.
Click to expand...
I know, but life is too short if it's not really needed.

It's up and working with the old ports. Straight from 7.4 to 9.1-RC3 (I svn'ed releng/9.1 so next week or so it will be RELEASE-9.1). The biggest problem so far was that the application had to be told about the change in serial port names (e.g. /dev/cuad0 became /dev/cuau0, the old /dev/cuau0 is now /dev/cuau2, etc.).

Now I have to check/reconfigure sendmail. Then I should rebuild the ports on my fast machine and bring over packages...
 
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