Upgrading to 15.0-RELEASE , the good, the bad, the ugly

Alain De Vos

Alain De Vos

First the good,
Everything works fine now.
Even nvidia, great have X

Now the bad,
Very, very slow process.
freebsd-upgrade gave wrong results.
It said userland was 15 even if it was 14.
You cannot force to install userland 15 when it wrongly detects 15.
What was the issue.
When i boot the userland is 15, but when i mount root filesystem the userland is 14.
freebsd-upgrade gets confused.
Bummer, big time problem.
Solution go to sources do a make installworld.
Problem fixed.
Moral of the story, it's important to be able to go to something "more privitive/basic" in order to solve problems.
If "make installworld" failed i had to ditch freebsd forever.
 
Alain De Vos said:
It said userland was 15 even if it was 14.
You cannot force to install userland 15 when it wrongly detects 15.
Click to expand...
How did you know the userland was still 14? freebsd-version(8)?

Alain De Vos said:
When i boot the userland is 15, but when i mount root filesystem the userland is 14.
freebsd-upgrade gets confused.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm confused too. When you say you booted it's 15? And then you mount the root filesystem? Why? You booted the system? All the way, or just to single user mode? Wasn't the root filesystem already mounted at that point?

Alain De Vos said:
freebsd-upgrade gets confused.
Click to expand...
Yes, that can happen. Specially when the upgrade process is interrupted and one or more freebsd-update install succeeded. There's always the --currently-running option to not detect the version and force a restart of the process.
Code: 
     --currently-running release
                    Do not detect the currently-running release; instead,
                    assume that the system is running the specified release.
                    This is most likely to be useful when upgrading jails.

Alain De Vos said:
Solution go to sources do a make installworld.
Problem fixed.
Click to expand...
Always an option of course. Except maybe when you've migrated to pkgbase. Then the process is a little more involved.

Alain De Vos said:
If "make installworld" failed i had to ditch freebsd forever.
Click to expand...
Nah. You sigh. Maybe some curse words. Then rethink what you did wrong. Correct the mistake, and try again.
 
Interesting. I'm using ZFS, started at 14.3-pX, created new BE, bectl mount freebsd-update upgrade -r 15.0, freebsd-update with chroot, pkg upgrade -f with chroot and bectl activate gave me a system booted into 15-RELEASE-p0 and freebsd-version being consistent.
I'm starting to think that people are not actually reading and following the freebsd-update instructions about "upgrading to new releases", rebooting enough times and running freebsd-update install enough times and forgetting to run pkg upgrade -f at the right time.
 
Alain De Vos said:
First the good,
Everything works fine now.
Even nvidia, great have X

Now the bad,
Very, very slow process.
freebsd-upgrade gave wrong results.
It said userland was 15 even if it was 14.
You cannot force to install userland 15 when it wrongly detects 15.
What was the issue.
When i boot the userland is 15, but when i mount root filesystem the userland is 14.
freebsd-upgrade gets confused.
Bummer, big time problem.
Solution go to sources do a make installworld.
Problem fixed.
Moral of the story, it's important to be able to go to something "more privitive/basic" in order to solve problems.
If "make installworld" failed i had to ditch freebsd forever.
Click to expand...

All this stuff needs to come with copy'n'paste of the commands you gave and the output of the program in question.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Now the bad,
Very, very slow process.
Click to expand...
I haven't updated an OS since XP/Vista days, but still feel it's quicker to clean install updates.

The OS itself might update fine, but it's 3rd-party stuff and their expectations that can lead to issues (like Fedora 43 with Wine and PostgreSQL)

mer said:
Interesting. I'm using ZFS, started at 14.3-pX, created new BE, bectl mount freebsd-update upgrade -r 15.0, freebsd-update with chroot, pkg upgrade -f with chroot and bectl activate gave me a system booted into 15-RELEASE-p0 and freebsd-version being consistent.
I'm starting to think that people are not actually reading and following the freebsd-update instructions about "upgrading to new releases", rebooting enough times and running freebsd-update install enough times and forgetting to run pkg upgrade -f at the right time.
Click to expand...
I used FreeBSD since 14.1, saw mention of bectl, but never used it :p (I'm not sure where to use that and heard of stuff with bootcode updates and ZFS; seems easier to wipe and just have the updated clean slate)
 
I have a boot usb stick with a 15 kernel and userland.
And this boot usb stick mounts root / to a usb partition on my hard disk with kernel 15 and userland 14.
After boot completes, freebsd-version -kru shows everything 15 , while userland was still 14.
But freebsd-upgrade does not allow to upgrade if it wrongly thinks it is already on 15, there is not a "force" , this is limitation.
I can't give the commands i typed (a lot), but was able to fix it with make installworld.
So in the end everything fine.
But it shows "freebsd-upgrade" is not infallible. And relying too much on one tool can be dangerous.

Note : i did not tried : "freebsd-upgrade --currently-running release"
 
Alain De Vos said:
I have a boot usb stick with a 15 kernel and userland.
And this boot usb stick mounts root / to a usb partition on my hard disk with kernel 15 and userland 14.
After boot completes, freebsd-version -kru shows everything 15 , while userland was still 14.
Click to expand...
To me this sounds like a very not standard thing; almost like a boot device of 15 with a root of 14.
If that is true, then yeah I would not expect freebsd-update to work.
 
I have many O.S.'s on my pc.
So i'm forced to use grub.
But the bios of my PC is stupid and can do random disk renumbering making grub fail big time.
My setup with a separate "boot" device (usb) solves this.
Because this setup is a bit special upgrading can be a little pain. I have to upgrade the usb stick & the hard disk partition.
And sooner or later one is upgraded and the other not.
I did not tried "chroot"
 
I recently (fresh installed) FreeBSD 15.0 to an INTEL NUC and....

It went completely smoothly :-) ! I was really impressed how well it went and how quickly I was able to be productive.

NICE WORK FREEBSD TEAM AND CONTRIBUTORS !
 
Alain De Vos said:
Because this setup is a bit special upgrading can be a little pain. I have to upgrade the usb stick & the hard disk partition.
And sooner or later one is upgraded and the other not.
Click to expand...
I used to have the boot dir on a usb stick (/boot on a running system was a symlink to /bootdisk/boot and /bootdisk was mounted from the usb stick). I just had to remember manually update the usb stick from the running system.
 
If you have the sources installed in /usr/src/ the time to process the thousands of individual files takes quite a while. If you want to speed up the freebsd-update(8) process remove the source files from /usr/src/, or if you really need those source files, remove the src from Components in freebsd-update.conf and use git or some other method to keep the sources updated.

Code: 
# Components of the base system which should be kept updated.
Components src world kernel
 
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