FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE Installation Instructions
Abstract
This article gives some brief instructions on installing FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE and upgrading the systems running earlier releases.
Table of Contents
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 Synchronizing Source
and Rebuilding
World
.
For SVN use the releng/9.3
branch which will be
where any upcoming Security Advisories or Errata Notices will be
applied.
Upgrading Using "FreeBSD Update"
The
freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and
amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running
8.4-RELEASE
, 9.[12]-RELEASE
,
9.3-BETA*
, or 9.3-RC*
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 9.3-RELEASE.
# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install
Now the freebsd-update(8) utility can fetch bits belonging to 9.3-RELEASE. During this process freebsd-update(8) will ask for help in merging configuration files.
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.3-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 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 8.4-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 9.3-RELEASE
# shutdown -r now
Last modified on: January 31, 2021 by Sergio Carlavilla Delgado