freebsd-update seems stuck while upgrading to a major version.

V

Vladimir1922

Hi there!

So I have this T60-T61 frankenpad. I did upgrade it to 12.4-p9 last year, and after the upgrade, the network just stopped working. After trying to fix it and not getting WiFi or ethernet in any way, and needing a more powerful computer for Uni, I stored the poor thing for about a year. Now I got some free time and decided to look at it. I managed to "fix" the network (actually, a ductape fix, it only works when I run a bsdinstall netconfig), I decided to upgrade to an actually supported version, so I decided to go 13.2, and maybe then 14.0.

Well, there is where the problems started: It seemed to work, but now it has been 8+ hours and it is still "Aplying patches". The cpu is "idle" at ~2-3%, cpu at a cool 35C, and the thing doesn't seem to finish applying those patches. It seems stuck.

I saw some folks having problems when using zfilesystem while upgrading to 14.0, but I am upgrading to 13.2 and I am using the BSD filesytem. It just might be my poor, underpowered core duo CPU, but I don't think it ever took that long to upgrade.
Is there any way of checking if the thing is working? (Disk activity LED is not blinking), or manage the upgrade without the script if that is the cause of the issue without reinstalling the whole thing?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: if I need to install some package it might be a problem: pkg doesn't seem operational as 12.4 is not supported, and I can't use it as it points to the wrong mirror. Maybe I can go installing from ports, but atm I don't dare, just in case the upgrade scripts decides to "wake up" (the laptop also needs a cleanup and overheats if I put in too much work, but again, after waiting for 8+ hours, I don't dare interrupting the process)
 
Vladimir1922 said:
Is there any way of checking if the thing is working?
Click to expand...
Little known "trick", hit CTRL-T. That should post some information about the process that's running. If you get nothing then the system might be hanging or dead-locked.

As this is an old system, is there anything worth saving? You could try a clean install with 13.2. Maybe the hardware itself is now a bit dodgy. The disk may have developed some problems, that could certainly cause it to stall.
 
Man, thank you! I didn't know that trick!. Yes, it is working. It downloaded 24170 patches. It seems it applied about 11000. So not an script issue, just an... slow, old and tired computer. At least I know it works! Thank you so much
 
If you're on the console, you could also open the second virtual console, login and run top(1) there. But yeah, it might just be really slow, Core2 Duo is relatively slow compared to today's CPUs. Does it have SATA or is this still IDE? That might be another factor. And a "slow" 5400 rpm disk. Everything combined won't make for a fast system. There are a LOT of files to download, unpack and write to disk. 8 Hours seems excessive though. Maybe disk (if it's IDE) is stuck on PIO instead of DMA?
 
It is actually SATA, and I installed an SSD on it, but being a 2005 machine, I doubt I am really getting any faster speed than I would with a "fast 7200" rpm disk. I installed an SSD just because I had one in hand and this laptop had quite a hard life, so something shock resistant was nice.
In any case, I also think 8 hours is too much. When I am back at home I might just give the thing a good cleaning and try again, to see if there is any change. After the upgrade, the machine actually runs quite nicely and is fast. I have to think if it is worth to move now to FreeBSD 14.0. Something tells me I won't get much out of the upgrade, but I really want to know why it was so slow!
 
Vladimir1922 said:
It is actually SATA
Click to expand...
Do you know the SATA version it supports? SATA 1 (1.5Gb/s) is much slower than SATA 3 (6Gb/s) for example. But check a couple of BIOS settings, if you have a choice setting the controller to AHCI is usually best.

Vladimir1922 said:
I doubt I am really getting any faster speed than I would with a "fast 7200" rpm disk.
Click to expand...
You should still see some improvement because an SSD has 0 seek time. That would, at least, make it 'feel' faster.
 
Problem isn't the CPU being too old.
My upgrade from 13.2 to 14.0 has now been running for over 7h30 after the first reboot and I have an Intel Pentium G4620 CPU and six Western Digital Red hard disks in a raidz2 pool. One of the disk is SMR, the 5 others are CMR.

OK, it's not a more recent beast of a machine, but usually it works perfectly well for eveything.

I don't know when it will end but it's not stuck:
load: 0.50 cmd: install 52543 [tx->tx_sync_done_cv] 0.05r 0.00u 0.00s 0% 2464k

I've been using FreeBSD since 10.x and it's the first time an update is taking that long.


Edit: finally it took a little over 9 hours. Now it's time to recompile ports… I can't wait for llvm and rust building :rolleyes:

Edit2: in the end, the complete update 13.2 → 14.0, with building of some ports took around 24h.
rust took 9h38, llvm14 took 12h21 and llvm15 took 10h35, wish we could get rid of building them every 2 days… Well, at least with ccache, it takes less time the others days.
 
Ah, I actually gave up on ports because of Webkit. Only that port takes 24+ hours on my laptop. And it upgrades too frequently! Even on my Uni machine with a last gen Ryzen 7 with Gentoo it takes a stupid amount of hours.
I am waiting for some thermal paste to arrive, because my main roadblock now for updates is that the laptop overheats and never completes the update (I had to do the 13.2 upgrade with the poor laptop upside down to prevent it rebooting randomly).

I will post results too, for reference reasons. I don't think there will be any advantage on my use case as I upgrade to 14.0 (actually I might find some nuisances, as I am used to use csh and sendmail, so I'll have to consider reverting back or getting used to the new defaults), but I want to know if it is common that the upgrade takes that long.

For reference, this laptop has a CoreDuo T9500, 2.6 GHZ, 32kb of L1 & L2 cache, 6Mb of L3 Cache. So it is not the low end of a Core2. It has 8GB of RAM. (I think this is a good amount for the usage I give it, but gave me trouble using ccache: It ran out of memory with big ports constantly).

I think that the main bottleneck for this machine is that it runs with integrated Intel graphics. It is not an issue compiling, but I need to consider it while installing new applications, as anything with 3D acceleration and even some 2D is quite unusable. Vulkan runs even worse than OpenGL on my case too. There was a version of the T61 with Discrete Nvidia graphics, but they where infamous for burning out the GPU. My goal when I built this machine was maximum lifespan, not max power.
 
I've seen updates by freebsd-update for src taking (many!) hours on some machines, especially on spinning rust, hence I usually nuke /usr/src (if populated on the specific host) before major upgrades and manually git pull a fresh tree after the upgrade.
 
Ok, so I changed thermal paste, cleaned my laptop and checked how long it would take a 14.0 upgrade to complete....
And about 2.5 hours? Less because I didn't realise the installer was stuck on a prompt while I was busy with other stuff.

So I didn't reproduce any issue with the update. All I can add, and maybe most people here know, is that the scripts never used over 50% of my CPU. Being a double core, I assume they are single threaded, so not very optimal. But whatever happened before, it didn't come back. I'll blame an overheating CPU throttling, but here I read some people with more powerful systems having issues too, so dunno.
 
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