Important FreeBSD Upgrade Notes

Freebird

Just a heads up I know a lot of people out there dont read the UPDATING file when upgrading releases, (shame on you). I should let you experience things the hard way but i thought i would point something important out for those of you preparing to update their systems to 5.2 upon it's release.


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The statfs structure has been updated with 64-bit fields to allow accurate reporting of multi-terabyte filesystem sizes. You should build world, then build and boot the new kernel BEFORE doing a `installworld' as the new kernel will know about binaries using the old statfs structure, but an old kernel will not know about the new system calls that support the new statfs structure. Note that the backwards compatibility is only present when the kernel is configured with the COMPAT_FREEBSD4 option. Since even /bin/sh will not run with a new kernel without said option you're pretty much dead in the water without it. Make sure you have COMPAT_FREEBSD4! Running an old kernel after a `make world' will cause programs such as `df' that do a statfs system call to fail with a bad system call. Marco Wertejuk also reports that cfsd (ports/security/cfs) needs to be recompiled after these changes are installed.

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DO NOT make installworld after the buildworld w/o building and installing a new kernel FIRST. You will be unable to build a new kernel otherwise on a system with new binaries and an old kernel.

However recovery is possible.. i've helped a few people out in recovering from this.


Pretty much the only way i found recovery to work is to boot into single user mode run mount -a and use the sysinstaller to upgrade with the 5.1 cd in your cdrom. you might even be able to use the upgrade from the cd it's self.. but that is the only method of recovering from this disaster.