upgrade revision 1.1.2.3 1 The upgrade to NetBSD _VER is a binary upgrade; it would be prohibitive
2 to make users upgrade by compiling and installing the _VER sources, and
3 it would be very difficult to even compile a set of instructions that
4 allowed them to do so. Because of the many changes to the system, it
5 is difficult and impractical to upgrade by recompiling from the sources
6 and installing.
7
8 Since upgrading involves replacing the boot blocks on your NetBSD
9 partition, the kernel, and most of the system binaries, it has the
10 potential to cause data loss. You are strongly advised to BACK UP ANY
11 IMPORTANT DATA ON YOUR DISK, whether on the NetBSD partition or on
12 another operating system's partition, before beginning the upgrade
13 process.
14
15 The upgrade is done entirely `by hand.' You will need first to boot
16 the new boot floppy or INSTALL kernel and use /usr/mdec/install to
17 install new boot blocks. Then you may extract a new kernel and the
18 distribution sets as described in section 5 of the installation
19 instructions.
20
21 After this point your machine is a complete NetBSD _VER system.
22 However, that doesn't mean that you're finished with the upgrade
23 process. You will probably want to update the set of device nodes
24 you have in /dev. If you've changed the contents of /dev by hand,
25 you will need to be careful about this, but if not, you can just
26 cd into /dev, and run the command "sh ./MAKEDEV all".
27
28 You must also deal with certain changes in the formats of some of
29 the configuration files. The most notable change is that we now
30 have an /etc/rc.conf file which describes most configuration options,
31 but also the "options" given to many of the file systems in /etc/fstab
32 or by hand have changed, and some of the file systems have changed
33 names. To find out what the new options are, it's suggested that
34 you read the manual page for the file systems' mount commands, for
35 example mount_nfs(8) for NFS.
36
37 Finally, you will want to delete old binaries that were part of
38 the version of NetBSD that you upgraded from and have since been
39 removed from the NetBSD distribution. Especially important, if you
40 use NFS, is removing /sbin/nfsd and /sbin/nfsiod; the new versions
41 of these programs are in /usr/sbin.
42