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FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE Installation Instructions

The FreeBSD Project

$FreeBSD: stable/9/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/installation/article.sgml 230001 2012-01-12 03:52:53Z hrs $

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This article gives some brief instructions on installing FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE and upgrading the systems running earlier releases.


1 Installing FreeBSD

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.


2 Upgrading FreeBSD

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


2.1 Upgrading from Source

The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html and http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook//makeworld.html.

For SVN use the releng/9.0 branch which will be where any upcoming Security Advisories or Errata Notices will be applied. The branch tag to use for updating the source is RELENG_9_0 for CVS.


2.2 Upgrading Using “FreeBSD Update”

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 7.[34]-RELEASE, 8.[12]-RELEASE, 9.0-BETA[123], or 9.0-RC[123] can upgrade as follows:

First, ensure that your current system is up to date; a change was recently made to freebsd-update(8) (Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-12:01.freebsd-update) which is needed in order to upgrade to FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE.

# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

Now the freebsd-update(8) utility can fetch bits belonging to 9.0-RELEASE. During this process freebsd-update(8) will ask for help in merging configuration files.

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.0-RELEASE

Due to changes in the way that FreeBSD is packaged on the release media, two complications may arise in this process if upgrading from FreeBSD 7.x or 8.x:

  1. The FreeBSD, which previously could appear in either /boot/kernel or /boot/GENERIC, now only appears as /boot/kernel. As a result, any kernel appearing in /boot/GENERIC will be deleted. Please carefully read the output printed by freebsd-update(8) and confirm that an updated kernel will be placed into /boot/kernel before proceeding beyond this point.

  2. The FreeBSD source tree in /usr/src (if present) will be deleted. (Normally the freebsd-update(8) utility will update a source tree, but in this case the changes in release packaging result in the freebsd-update(8) utility not recognizing that the source tree from the old release and the source tree from the new release correspond to the same part of FreeBSD.)

# 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 FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE or earlier 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:

# freebsd-update install

Finally, reboot into 9.0-RELEASE

# shutdown -r now

This file, and other release-related documents, can be downloaded from http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/.

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.

All users of FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE should subscribe to the <stable@FreeBSD.org> mailing list.

For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.


Last modified on: May 15, 2021 by Allan Jude