Solved Strange issue during upgrade to FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE

[circus78]

Hi,
yesterday I launched upgrade from 12.1-RELEASE to 12.2-RELEASE.
I used these commands, as usual:

1423 2021-02-09 20:45 freebsd-update fetch (nothing to do)
1424 2021-02-09 20:46 pkg upgrade

(here I got some packages upgrade: misc/pciids, archivers/zstd, graphics/wayland, devel/libunwind, devel/readline, misc/help2man, graphics/freeglut, devel/bison )

1425 2021-02-09 20:47 freebsd-update upgrade -r 12.2-RELEASE

(I needed to modify a few config files with editors/vi )
These are my last output lines of upgrade process:

look: INDEX-NEW: No such file or directory
look: INDEX-NEW: No such file or directory
comm: INDEX-NEW: No such file or directory
rm: modifiedfiles: No such file or directory
rm: INDEX-PRESENT: No such file or directory

No updates needed to update system to 12.2-RELEASE-p3.
touch: f465c3739385890c221dff1a05e578c6cae0d0430e46996d319db7439f884336-install/kernelfirst: No such file or directory
To install the downloaded upgrades, run "/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install".
root@server:~ # /usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
No updates are available to install.
Run '/usr/sbin/freebsd-update fetch' first.
root@server:~ # /usr/sbin/freebsd-update fetch
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 12.1-RELEASE from update4.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.
Preparing to download files... done.

No updates needed to update system to 12.1-RELEASE-p13.

WARNING: FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE-p13 HAS PASSED ITS END-OF-LIFE DATE.
Any security issues discovered after Sun Jan 31 01:00:00 CET 2021
will not have been corrected.

Why it is still saying "No updates needed to update system to 12.1-RELEASE-p13"?

 

[SirDice]

Looks like something went wrong with the downloads. Before running freebsd-update upgrade I tend to clear out the cache, so I have a "fresh" download directory. rm -rf /var/db/freebsd-update/*. Then run freebsd-update -r 12.2-RELEASE upgrade.

 

[grahamperrin]

From this:

No updates needed to update system to 12.2-RELEASE-p3.

– I assume that you were midway through a successful upgrade; if you had run:

freebsd-version -kru

– you would have found 12.2-RELEASE-p3 installed but not yet running.

Without a timely restart of the OS:

/usr/sbin/freebsd-update fetch

– sought updates for inferior 12.1-RELEASE-p13, which are not applicable to 12.2-RELEASE-p3 .

I'm reminded of https://github.com/helloSystem/Utilities/issues/33#issuecomment-780989454

… possibility of shooting oneself in the foot, in cases where the system actively instructs the user to check for updates to FreeBSD …

 

[Snurg]

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/ confirms that:

Question is how to find out whether it is actually necessary to reboot.

If I understand correctly:
If installed kernel and running kernel are still same after running freebsd-update: Continue without rebooting.
If installed kernel and running kernel differ after updating: Reboot before continuing.

Please correct me if I understood wrong.