Monday, May 8, 2017

Upgrading Using “FreeBSD Update”

Ivan Boginski May 08, 2017 0 Comments

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 9.3-RELEASE, 10.1-RELEASE, 10.2-RELEASE, 10.3-RELEASE, 11.0-RC[123] can upgrade as follows:

# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

Now the freebsd-update(8) utility can fetch bits belonging to 11.0-RELEASE. During this process freebsd-update(8) will ask for help in merging configuration files.

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.0-RELEASE

# freebsd-update install

The system must now be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before the non-kernel components are updated.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update(8) needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

At this point, users of systems being upgraded from earlier FreeBSD releases will be prompted by freebsd-update(8) to rebuild all third-party applications (e.g., ports installed from the ports tree) due to updates in system libraries.
After updating installed third-party applications (and again, only if freebsd-update(8) printed a message indicating that this was necessary), run freebsd-update(8) again so that it can delete the old (no longer used) system libraries: