xref: /src/distrib/notes/alpha/upgrade

The upgrade to NetBSD _VER is a binary upgrade; it would be prohibitive
to make users upgrade by compiling and installing the _VER sources, and
it would be very difficult to even compile a set of instructions that
allowed them to do so.  Because of the many changes to the system, it
is difficult and impractical to upgrade by recompiling from the sources
and installing.

Since upgrading involves replacing the boot blocks on your NetBSD
partition, the kernel, and most of the system binaries, it has the
potential to cause data loss.  You are strongly advised to BACK UP ANY
IMPORTANT DATA ON YOUR DISK, whether on the NetBSD partition or on
another operating system's partition, before beginning the upgrade
process.

The upgrade is done entirely `by hand.' You will need first to boot
the new boot floppy or INSTALL kernel and use /usr/mdec/install to
install new boot blocks. Then you may extract a new kernel and the
distribution sets as described in section 5 of the installation
instructions.

After this point your machine is a complete NetBSD _VER system.
However, that doesn't mean that you're finished with the upgrade
process.  You will probably want to update the set of device nodes
you have in /dev.  If you've changed the contents of /dev by hand,
you will need to be careful about this, but if not, you can just
cd into /dev, and run the command "sh MAKEDEV all".

You must also deal with certain changes in the formats of some of
the configuration files. The most notable change is that we now
have an /etc/rc.conf file which describes most configuration options,
but also the "options" given to many of the file systems in /etc/fstab
or by hand have changed, and some of the file systems have changed
names.  To find out what the new options are, it's suggested that
you read the manual page for the file systems' mount commands, for
example mount_nfs(8) for NFS.

Finally, you will want to delete old binaries that were part of
the version of NetBSD that you upgraded from and have since been
removed from the NetBSD distribution. Especially important, if you
use NFS, is removing /sbin/nfsd and /sbin/nfsiod; the new versions
of these programs are in /usr/sbin.