Pkgbase 15 to 15.1 stories?

As this is probably the first instance of release FreeBSD being upgraded by another means, I wanted to do some chit chat before the upgrade.
The minor version bump using pkgbase looks pretty straightforward.
However the major version bump seems awfully "rude" as if there was not a procedure but a way to make it work that way using env vars and complicated workflow.

Has anyone done it yet, 15 to 15.1 using pkgbase, did it go seamless per instructions?
 
Hi Mate

I upgraded to 15.1 using pkgbase

Using a bectl boot environment and poudriere to build the nvidia-driver and nvidia-drm-66-kmod
Which took 11 and half hours to build on my Dell xps 15 2019 with 16 gb of ram

Heres the forum post


and my notes

 
As this is probably the first instance of release FreeBSD being upgraded by another means, I wanted to do some chit chat before the upgrade.
The minor version bump using pkgbase looks pretty straightforward.
However the major version bump seems awfully "rude" as if there was not a procedure but a way to make it work that way using env vars and complicated workflow.

Has anyone done it yet, 15 to 15.1 using pkgbase, did it go seamless per instructions?

Yes, and ran into PR 296052 as per this thread.

/grandpa
 
Been smooth on several upgrades. I did run into issues with the machine that had an Nvidia card. I also used bectl first to create a backup boot environment. For me, I had to, after updating the machine with Nvidia, update ports to the newest, and then install nvidia-drm-kmod and nvidia-drm-66-kmod. Gory details here


But on a few AMD machines and a Thinkpad laptop, all went smoothly.
 
Yes no problem
Upgrade
 
I'm writing a script for that, but it's not yet ready.

It managed these upgrades:

- 15.0-RELEASE -> 15.1-RC2
- 15.1-RC2 -> 15.1-RELEASE
- 15.0-RELEASE -> 15.1-RELEASE
- 15.1-RELEASE -> 15-STABLE
- 15.0-RELEASE -> 15-STABLE
- 15.1-RELEASE -> 16-CURRENT

It works for major version change.
It uses both temporary repo conf file and var ABI change.
It checks and avoids some pitfalls.
It forces kmods upgrade in all cases and all pkg in case of a major version upgrade.

I'm convinced we need a tool like this as we have freebsd-update on the other side.
So, I move things forward, at least for me, as upgrades under pkgbase aren't as easy as with freebsd-update.
 
I'm not doing pkgbase, but since pkg has worked just fine for a long time, I would think pkgbase should be no different.

What NapoleonWils0n and scottro say about manually creating a new BE is a good idea; especially since one can mount a BE and pkg supports a "-c" option which does a chroot.
When I do an upgrade across a release, I create new BE, mount it, use freebsd-update with -b and -d to do the updates into the new BE, then pkg-static -c to upgrade the new BE.
That should also work for pkgbase (of course not using freebsd-update).

An advantage of doing this is a single reboot into the new BE, you can make the new BE consistent with base and ports, you can tweak etc/rc.conf to not load problematic modules (drm).
 
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