Home | History | Annotate | Line # | Download | only in alpha
upgrade revision 1.5 
      1 	$NetBSD: upgrade,v 1.5 1998/05/09 04:02:07 ross Exp $	
      2 
      3 The upgrade to NetBSD _VER is a binary upgrade; it can be quite difficult
      4 to advance to a later version by recompiling from source due primarily
      5 to interdepencies in the various components.
      6 
      7 Since upgrading involves replacing the boot blocks on your NetBSD
      8 partition, the kernel, and most of the system binaries, it has the
      9 potential to cause data loss.  You are strongly advised to BACK UP ANY
     10 IMPORTANT DATA ON YOUR DISK, whether on the NetBSD partition or on
     11 another operating system's partition, before beginning the upgrade
     12 process.
     13 
     14 The upgrade is done entirely `by hand.' You will need first to boot
     15 the new boot floppy or INSTALL kernel and use /usr/mdec/installboot
     16 to install new boot blocks. Then you may extract a new kernel and the
     17 distribution sets as described in section 5 of the installation
     18 instructions.
     19 
     20 After this point your machine is a complete NetBSD _VER system.
     21 However, that doesn't mean that you're finished with the upgrade
     22 process.  You will probably want to update the set of device nodes
     23 you have in /dev.  If you've changed the contents of /dev by hand,
     24 you will need to be careful about this, but if not, you can just
     25 cd into /dev, and run the command "sh ./MAKEDEV all".
     26 
     27 You must also deal with certain changes in the formats of some of
     28 the configuration files. The most notable change is that we now
     29 have an /etc/rc.conf file which describes most configuration options,
     30 but also the "options" given to many of the file systems in /etc/fstab
     31 or by hand have changed, and some of the file systems have changed
     32 names.  To find out what the new options are, it's suggested that
     33 you read the manual page for the file systems' mount commands, for
     34 example mount_nfs(8) for NFS.
     35 
     36 Finally, you will want to delete old binaries that were part of
     37 the version of NetBSD that you upgraded from and have since been
     38 removed from the NetBSD distribution. Especially important, if you
     39 use NFS, is removing /sbin/nfsd and /sbin/nfsiod; the new versions
     40 of these programs are in /usr/sbin.
     41