When to upgrade to FreeBSD 9?

H

hockey97

Currently on my servers I have FreeBSD 8.1 but recently I am thinking to upgrade to FreeBSD 9 just so I can have the latest OS on the system.

How easy is it to upgrade the OS without any issues occurring?

I want to upgrade but I fear that some hardware and other things in the OS might not work properly or mess up my websites. Is the upgrade fairly easy and bulletproof for hardware and software errors?
 
OS-wise, I would say it's quite safe to upgrade. However, you might run into problems when recompiling all the installed ports and therefore I would suggest (if possible) to check the critical (currently installed) ports, if they compile on version 9.

Personally, I had a little problem with poptop when jumping from 8.2 to 9.0 because
Code: 
poptop-1.3.4_2 is marked as broken: fails to build with new utmpx
 
hockey97 said:
Currently on my servers I have FreeBSD 8.1 but recently I am thinking to upgrade to FreeBSD 9 just so I can have the latest OS on the system.

How easy is it to upgrade the OS without any issues occurring?

I want to upgrade but I fear that some hardware and other things in the OS might not work properly or mess up my websites. Is the upgrade fairly easy and bulletproof for hardware and software errors?
Click to expand...

Just make sure that you read the detailed Release Notes. Pay special attention to section 3.2.3!
 
I've upgraded about 5 systems from 8.2 to 9.0. I've had one system not able to boot on its own due to using gmirror, and thus haven't upgraded any other system that uses it. For systems not using gmirror it's been pretty painless.

As gkontos suggests, pay attention to the release notes. If you use SATA, your disk device names will change. 9.0 still does a good job with symlinks to the old names which allows it to boot, likely you'll still want to update the device names in fstab before a 9x kernel boot.
 
This is an open ended question - it depends on how mission critical your servers are and whether or not they run anything exotic or run on any rare hardware (which could cause you to run into early-adopter bugs).

As always, try and run your application(s) in a test environment first. These days with the availability of VirtualBox, VMware, etc - there's really no excuse for not doing at least some rudimentary level of testing.

8.2 is still supported, and 8.3 is out soon. Unless you need the new features of 9.0, or have a fairly basic production environment, I'd hold off until 8.3, and let 9.0 get a bit more real world testing for a bit.

Personally, I'm playing with 9.0 at the moment on my workstation, my production boxes are still on 8.2 and even have one on 7.4.

Any new deployments where you can gradually introduce the machine into production though (i.e., run with a pilot workload for a bit first), I'd be installing 9.0.

I guess what I'm saying is that shifting to 9.0 is a risk (however small). If you are already running fine on 8.2, it's an un-necessary risk ("just to have the latest OS on them"). If your servers are mission-critical, I'd be testing right now, but not moving until 8.x is near end of support.


2c
 
Well, v9 fixed a whole lot more here than it broke, the latest fix is the SUJ
Code: 
 tunefs -j enable /dev/ad...
which has near-seamlessly fixed the few crashes which have happened since, if not "crashing-from-X-rather-than-rebooting-to-fsck" even. Wish I'd known way earlier...
 
^^ you're aware of the SU+J issues that have been reported on freebsd-stable?


Don't remember specifics, but I'd check out the list for details.


edit:
Specfics being inability to recover properly from crash, fs corruption, etc.

Check the freebsd-stable list archive around 27/1/2012 onwards.
 
throAU said:
^^ you're aware of the SU+J issues that have been reported on freebsd-stable?


Don't remember specifics, but I'd check out the list for details.


edit:
Specfics being inability to recover properly from crash, fs corruption, etc.

Check the freebsd-stable list archive around 27/1/2012 onwards.
Click to expand...

I only attempted SUJ after a freebsd-current post suggested that (paraphrasing, *might*not* be entirely accurate) that a corrupted SUJ can be fixed by fsck after removing the .sujournal... Haven't had any problems running SUJ that were that drastic, even after several crashes ( which now occur less often by at least a factor of 2, although builds in X seem to go slower) .
 
Well, I am hosting others' websites and mail. So I am running something delegate.

The only stuff I have installed is gnome, apache, php, a pop3 server and postfix.

That is pretty much it. I only have a time frame at 12am to do the switch so between 12am to 8am. That is the only time. So I can't have or afford mishaps. I didn't upgrade yet. Just trying to figure out if it's worth upgrading to 9, the latest version. What is so different between 9.0 compared to the other 8.0 versions?
 
For starters this. Regarding your upgrade, maybe it would be interesting to do a dump of the whole system and restore to a test machine and upgrade the test machine? That way, I think you will have first hand experience about the potential problems you would face a real-world upgrade.
 
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