1 $NetBSD: upgrade,v 1.15 1998/05/12 00:00:19 ross Exp $ 2 3The upgrade to NetBSD _VER is a binary upgrade; it can be quite difficult 4to advance to a later version by recompiling from source due primarily 5to interdependencies in the various components. 6 7To do the upgrade, you must have the boot floppy image (boot.fs) 8available. You must also have at least the "base" and "kern" 9binary distribution sets available, so that you can upgrade with it, 10using one of the upgrade methods described above. Finally, you must 11have sufficient disk space available to install the new binaries. 12Since the old binaries are being overwritten in place, you only need 13space for the new binaries, which weren't previously on the system. 14If you have a few megabytes free on each of your root and /usr 15partitions, you should have enough space. 16 17Since upgrading involves replacing the boot blocks on your NetBSD 18partition, the kernel, and most of the system binaries, it has the 19potential to cause data loss. You are strongly advised to BACK UP ANY 20IMPORTANT DATA ON YOUR DISK, whether on the NetBSD partition or on 21another operating system's partition, before beginning the upgrade 22process. 23 24The upgrade procedure using the sysinst tool is basically the 25same as an installation, but without the hard disk partitioning. 26Another difference is that existing configuration files in /etc 27are backed up, and merged with the new files. Getting the binary 28sets is done in the same manner as the installation procedure; 29refer to the installation part of the document, section 7 and 8, 30on how to do this. Also, some sanity checks are done, i.e. 31filesystems are checked before unpacking the sets. 32 33After a new kernel has been copied to your hard disk, your 34machine is a complete NetBSD _VER system. However, that 35doesn't mean that you're finished with the upgrade process. 36You will probably want to update the set of device 37nodes you have in /dev. If you've changed the contents of 38/dev by hand, you will need to be careful about this, but if 39not, you can just cd into /dev, and run the command "sh 40MAKEDEV all". 41 42You must also deal with certain changes in the formats of 43some of the configuration files. The most notable change is 44that the "options" given to many of the file systems in 45/etc/fstab or by hand have changed, and some of the file 46systems have changed names. To find out what the new options 47are, it's suggested that you read the manual page 48for the file systems' mount commands, for example mount_nfs(8) 49for NFS. 50 51Finally, you will want to delete old binaries that were part 52of the version of NetBSD that you upgraded from and have since 53been removed from the NetBSD distribution. 54