FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE Installation Instructions

This article gives some brief instructions on installing FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE and upgrading the systems running earlier releases.

The Installing FreeBSD chapter of the FreeBSD Handbook provides more in-depth information about the installation program itself, including a guided walk-through with screenshots.

If you are upgrading from a previous release of FreeBSD, please read upgrading section in the Release Notes for notable incompatibilities carefully.

The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in Updating FreeBSD from Source.

For SVN use the releng/12.1 branch which will be where any upcoming Security Advisories or Errata Notices will be applied.

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 11.3-RELEASE or 12.0-RELEASE can upgrade as follows:

Now the freebsd-update(8) utility can fetch bits belonging to 12.1-RELEASE. During this process freebsd-update(8) will ask for help in merging configuration files.

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

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

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:

Finally, reboot into 12.1-RELEASE

After rebooting, it is recommended to regenerate the pkg binary tool to prevent future issues when installing some applications using the pkg tool.