upgrade revision 1.3 1 $NetBSD: upgrade,v 1.3 1998/01/09 18:45:38 perry Exp $
2
3 The upgrade to NetBSD _VER is a binary upgrade; it would be prohibitive
4 to make users upgrade by compiling and installing the _VER sources, and
5 it would be very difficult to even compile a set of instructions that
6 allowed them to do so. Because of the many changes to the system, it
7 is difficult and impractical to upgrade by recompiling from the sources
8 and installing.
9
10 Since upgrading involves replacing the boot blocks on your NetBSD
11 partition, the kernel, and most of the system binaries, it has the
12 potential to cause data loss. You are strongly advised to BACK UP ANY
13 IMPORTANT DATA ON YOUR DISK, whether on the NetBSD partition or on
14 another operating system's partition, before beginning the upgrade
15 process.
16
17 The upgrade is done entirely `by hand.' You will need first to boot
18 the new boot floppy or INSTALL kernel and use /usr/mdec/install to
19 install new boot blocks. Then you may extract a new kernel and the
20 distribution sets as described in section 5 of the installation
21 instructions.
22
23 After this point your machine is a complete NetBSD _VER system.
24 However, that doesn't mean that you're finished with the upgrade
25 process. You will probably want to update the set of device nodes
26 you have in /dev. If you've changed the contents of /dev by hand,
27 you will need to be careful about this, but if not, you can just
28 cd into /dev, and run the command "sh ./MAKEDEV all".
29
30 You must also deal with certain changes in the formats of some of
31 the configuration files. The most notable change is that we now
32 have an /etc/rc.conf file which describes most configuration options,
33 but also the "options" given to many of the file systems in /etc/fstab
34 or by hand have changed, and some of the file systems have changed
35 names. To find out what the new options are, it's suggested that
36 you read the manual page for the file systems' mount commands, for
37 example mount_nfs(8) for NFS.
38
39 Finally, you will want to delete old binaries that were part of
40 the version of NetBSD that you upgraded from and have since been
41 removed from the NetBSD distribution. Especially important, if you
42 use NFS, is removing /sbin/nfsd and /sbin/nfsiod; the new versions
43 of these programs are in /usr/sbin.
44