Daemonic Dispatches - Latest Comments in FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

transfer to ipod — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:13:21 -0000

Thanks for posting the instructions on performing a major version upgrade of FreeBSD using FreeBSD Update; Just keep on posting. Thanks a lot!

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

cperciva — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:19:18 -0000

Yes, RELENG_8 is the tag for 8-STABLE, while RELENG_8_0 is the tag for the 8.0-RELEASE errata branch. (And RELENG_8_0_0_RELEASE is the tag for the release itself.)

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Colin Brace — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:18:05 -0000

After some delay, I upgraded my server. I grabbed the source with cvsup, then did the customary buildworld/build kernel/installworld sequence. My system is now upgraded, but it appears to be again a STABLE rather than a release version. Perhaps I misunderstood the tag option in the supfile; I used RELENG_8. Should I have used RELENG_8_0?

Anyway, looks like I will have to wait until the next RELEASE to get back into the STABLE sequence, so I can use freebsd-update.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

jim — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:30:22 -0000

me again.. i installed misc/compat7x and that fixed the problem. would love a more detailed explanation on this.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

jim — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:58:51 -0000

FreeBSD# smbd
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libz.so.4" not found, required by "smbd"

FreeBSD# find / -name 'ld-elf.so.1' -print
/usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1

Looks like the path changed?

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

jim — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:56:16 -0000

trying to upgrade from 7.2-RELASE to 8.0-RELEASE and not sure where i'm going wrong any advice would be helpful.

i followed your steps but after the final reboot i'm trying to start samba and i'm getting the following library errors:

FreeBSD# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba onestart
Starting nmbd.
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libcrypt.so.4" not found, required by "nmbd"
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba: WARNING: failed to start nmbd
Starting smbd.
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libz.so.4" not found, required by "smbd"
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba: WARNING: failed to start smbd
Starting winbindd.
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libcrypt.so.4" not found, required by "winbindd"
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba: WARNING: failed to start winbindd

any ideas?

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

epte — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:25:22 -0000

I understand better what was going on now. When I tried to install 8.0, I noticed it was complaining about the GPT secondary partitions being corrupt, or some such. After searching for GPT issues, I found that FreeBSD can use GPT partition tables, but with some manual steps OR you have to wipe out the GPT tables by dd'ing the first two and last two sectors of the disk from /dev/zero (FreeBSD doesn't overwrite the partition table when making entries apparently). I zeroed my GPT, and now it works fine (though I still get some GEOM label removed warnings in 7.2).

I hadn't understood any of this the first time around, and didn't even know GPT existed. The handbook makes no mention of GPT issues whatsoever, and neither does the installer.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

epte — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:01:32 -0000

Well, it just bit me, and here's what I've been able to figure out:

Ever after my 7.2 install, I had GEOM warnings, and GEOM labels being removed, and other nasty-looking messages. I googled for it, and some people seemed to think it was benign, so I went on believing the extra messages were debug-level internal workings that could safely be ignored. My computer worked like a charm for quite some time.

Then, when I upgraded to 8.0, several really nasty things happened. As per the suggestion on the freebsd install site, I used freebsd-upgrade. Nowhere did it tell me that it would whack my kernel, and not back up my old one. I mean, c'mon. Backing up the kernel is a given.

So here I am trying to boot my 8.0 kernel, and it can't mountroot. It can't find the root partition. Why is that? The disklabel seems to be correct, because I can see my partitions with correct sizes when doing a "lsdev -v" from the bootloader prompt. Booting into an install disk, however, shows that my primary labels (the fdisk-able partition table) is completely wrong! Wrong numbers of partitions. Wrong types. Wrong starts and ends. Wrong sizes.

So it seems that the 7.2 installer did a sucky job at partitioning my disk, the 7.2 kernel was able to read this mess (paying attention to the secondary labels -- the BSD disklabels), and the 8.0 kernel is no longer so tolerant. Even if I _could_ get back my 7.2 kernel, I'd still be screwed in the end, because of my messed up partition table, which I've had since my install, it would seem. It would be stuck in 7.2 without option to upgrade.

So, my options from this point are:
1) Try and deduce correct numbers and boot to a partitioning tool, and try to fix the DOS partition table. I'm not a fan of the high probability of being one-off on my disk boundaries though.
2) Reinstall from scratch with 8.0, hoping that its installer knows what it's doing.

This is not giving me a good first impression of FreeBSD. I've used various Linuxes and BSDs, and was giving FreeBSD a try. I know better now than to trust the stability of the releases. I'll have to double check everything. :-(

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

cperciva — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:26:30 -0000

This is a GEOM issue which seems to bite some people but not others -- I'm not quite sure why.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

B2Pi — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:07:25 -0000

I upgraded a 7.2-RELEASE system. All went swimmingly, save that my disk devices where changed from daNs1D, where N is the drive number, and D the partition number. All of my devices were on slice 1. This isn't, I'm sure, a freebsd-update issue, but it was definitely a surprise. I may have caught a cold from going barefoot into the cellar where the machine is to fix the fstab file

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Benjamin Lee — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:51:18 -0000

When upgrading from 7.2-RELEASE, ipfw will be broken after booting into the new kernel. I saw multiple ipfw kernel messages:

ipfw: size mismatch (have 64 want 68)
ipfw: size mismatch (have 44 want 48)

One workaround is to set firewall_enable="NO" before rebooting. Otherwise, be prepared to grab console.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Ari Maniatis — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:23:01 -0000

I'm not sure where else to post issues with freebsd-update, so this seems like the best place for now to get Colin's attention. For users who have compiled a /boot/loader with ZFS support (since they are booting from ZFS), the freebsd-update to RC3 will replace that with a version which does NOT support booting from ZFS. This is very very annoying when the server is in a data centre...

Can I suggest that freebsd-update detect this condition and either:

1. install a loader with the broadest possible support (no one will complain will they?)
2. warn the user they are about to shoot themselves in the foot very painfully.

(1) would be much nicer.

Thanks for a great tool.
Ari

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

cperciva — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:45:27 -0000

The problem is that you're running 7.0-STABLE. There is no way for freebsd-update to know where along the 7-STABLE branch you are between 7.0-RELEASE and 7.1-RELEASE, so it can't do things like figuring out what files you've modified locally etc.

You'll have to upgrade to a RELEASE via buildworld/buildkernel/installkernel/installworld before you can use FreeBSD Update to update your system.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Colin Brace — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:12:28 -0000

Hi,

I've used freebsd-update several times to upgrade systems quite successfully.

At the moment, I have 7.0-STABLE installed on a small server. I would like to upgrade it to 8.0-RC2.

To start with, I've updated all my ports with portupgrade.

However when I run freebsd-update the first time, I get error messages:

$ sudo freebsd-update -r 8.0-BETA1 upgrade
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 7.0-STABLE from update5.FreeBSD.org... failed.
Fetching metadata signature for 7.0-STABLE from update4.FreeBSD.org... failed.
Fetching metadata signature for 7.0-STABLE from update2.FreeBSD.org... failed.
No mirrors remaining, giving up.

I've googled this, and found various hits, but the problem and solution still aren't clear to me.

Thanks.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

cperciva — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:45:37 -0000

Yes.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Jamie — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:58:21 -0000

couldn't you simply revert to the generic kernel, perform the update, then revert back to your customised kernel (making appropriate changes due to version changes?

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Royce — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:23:31 -0000

I've often started a portupgrade run, and come back an hour later to see that it's been waiting for me to answer a configuration question. This can be especially frustrating when performing upgrades like this one on a system with many ports.

The solution is portupgrade's '-c' or '--config' option. It makes portupgrade ask you all of the config dialogs at the *beginning* of the portupgrade run. Much preferable.

So I recommend:

portupgrade -afc

Enjoy!

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Ari Maniatis — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:31:32 -0000

You cannot use this mechanism for updating a custom kernel. You need to compile from source the old fashioned way.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

Ari Maniatis — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:30:40 -0000

Last night we upgraded one of our servers from 7.2 to 8.0-beta1 using the freebsd-update tool and following the instructions on this blog. I believe this problem will occur even if we had used a source update mechanism.

The usual upgrade path is to install the new kernel, reboot, then install world. This fails because when rebooting into the 8.0 kernel with 7.2 userland, ZFS is unable to properly initialise and the file systems are not mounted. In our case we are booting with a small UFS partition to load the kernel, and then mounting /usr /var, etc from ZFS as per these instructions [1].

The problem with ZFS userland being out of sync with the kernel has been seen before [2] [3]. However now with lots of people running ZFS and starting to upgrade to 8.0, I think this will bite many more.

The workaround is to drop into single user mode, mount all the zfs partitions, and do the userland install.

mount -t zfs /usr
mount -t zfs /var
mount -o rw tank/root /

Those mount commands are slightly non-obvious and took a little guessing to get right. You can't use the 'zfs mount' command since it is broken at this point in time.

The other solution is to install userland BEFORE you reboot into the new kernel, although that may cause its own set of problems. Whatever the final solution, this needs to be clearly documented and ideally freebsd-update needs to detect the problem and advise the user about what to do.

Ari Maniatis

[1] http://www.ish.com.au/solut...
[2] http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A...
[3] http://www.nabble.com/zfs-v...

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

kegf — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:16:34 -0000

Please sorry for my english.
How upgrade system with custom kernel?

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

cperciva — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:17:32 -0000

If you're installing a new system, you won't have to do any of the above -- this is just for upgrading existing systems.

Re: FreeBSD Update to 8.0-BETA1

michaelathissell — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:19:30 -0000

Mr. Percival -

So, if I'm starting from ground zero (fresh) with Sunday's AMD-x64 .iso on a wholly dedicated 80GB harddrive....there should be minimal additional hoops to jump thru, such as above. ...yes? :-)

I'd had smooth working FreeBSD systems over the past couple of years and touted the features and ease of operation/install to others. I underwent a major change in locale a year ago and just (now) coming back to FreeBSD. It's not as I recalled. Several of the 7-Betas did not work as expected. With additional duties surrounding my job....I've lagged in keeping up. I realize 99% of the problems are right in front of the keyboard!

I'll let 8-BETA1 download overnight as internet is not the quickest from the part of the world. I will also update my FreeBSD Handbook.

Best Regards from South Asia,

Mike
Negombo, Sri Lanka