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FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE Installation Instructions

This article gives some brief instructions on installing FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE and upgrading the systems running earlier releases.

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.

Upgrading FreeBSD

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

Upgrading from Source

The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in https://doc.FreeBSD.org/en/books/handbook/book/#synching and https://doc.FreeBSD.org/en/books/handbook/book/#makeworld.

For SVN use the releng/9.1 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_1 for CVS.

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-RELEASE, 9.1-BETA1, or 9.1-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 9.1-RELEASE.

# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

Now the freebsd-update(8) utility can fetch bits belonging to 9.1-RELEASE. During this process freebsd-update(8) will ask for help in merging configuration files.

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.1-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:

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.
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 9.1-RELEASE

# shutdown -r now

Last modified on: January 31, 2021 by Sergio Carlavilla Delgado