Table of Contents
A common mechanism for upgrading a NetBSD system to a newer version is by rebuilding the system from sources and installing the results. This works both for stable releases such as NetBSD 9.2 and for NetBSD-current. In particular, if you are running a stable NetBSD release in a production environment, you are encouraged to perform this procedure regularly in order to incorporate any security fixes that have been applied to the branch since its release.
There are a variety of ways of achieving the goal of rebuilding NetBSD from source, and this chapter will guide you through the variety of options that are available. The chapter starts by showing first what the manual procedure looks like, and proceeds to describe some of automation tools that simplify the process.
Please remember to check src/UPDATING for the latest changes and special instructions that may be involved in upgrading the system.
Most of the following steps can be done as ordinary user.
Only the installation of a new kernel and the userland will require
root privileges.
Although /usr is choosen as the working
directory in the following examples, the procedure can also
take place in a user's home directory. Ordinary users have normally not
the permissions to make changes in /usr,
but this can be changed by root.
Having up-to-date sources is a prerequisite for the following steps. Section 32.4, “Fetching by CVS” informs about the ways to retrieve or update the sources for a release, stable or current branch (using CVS).
Please always refer to the output of build.sh -h
and the files UPDATING and
BUILDING for details - it's worth
it, there are many options that can
be set on the command line or in
/etc/mk.conf
The first step is to build the userland:
$cd /usr/src$./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U distribution
The next step will build the kernel:
$cd /usr/src$./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U kernel=<KERNEL>
Installing the new kernel, rebooting (to ensure that the new kernel works) and installing the new userland are the final steps of the updating procedure:
$cd /usr/src$su#mv /netbsd /netbsd.old#mv /usr/obj/sys/arch/<ARCH>/compile/<KERNEL>/netbsd /#shutdown -r now...$cd /usr/src$su#./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U install=/
If the new kernel netbsd does not boot
successfully, you can fall back on booting the
netbsd.old kernel.
Updating your system's configuration files is done in two steps. First, postinstall(8) is used to check and fix things that can be easily automated. Afterwards, etcupdate(8) is used to merge the remaining configuration file changes.
#/usr/sbin/postinstall -s /usr/src check#/usr/sbin/postinstall -s /usr/src fix#/usr/sbin/etcupdate -s /usr/src
Optionally reboot to ensure all running services are using the new binaries:
#shutdown -r now
From the root of the source tree:
$cd /usr/src
Build the userland:
$./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U -u distribution
Build the kernel:
$./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U -u kernel=GENERIC
Install the kernel:
$cd ../obj/sys/arch/<ARCH>/compile/GENERIC$su#mv /netbsd /netbsd.old#cp netbsd /netbsd
Reboot into the new kernel:
#shutdown -r now
Install the new userland:
$cd /usr/src$su#./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U install=/
Update the system and configuration files;:
#/usr/sbin/etcupdate -s /usr/src
In the procedure above, the -u option indicates an update process,
and that a make clean operation should not be run before starting the build. This is
useful when doing an update from a previous build and/or a fresh build. The
-U option allows the entire build by a non-root user
followed with an install by root.
It is also possible to use sysinst to install a freshly
built system. The steps are as follows:
Build a complete release:
$./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U -u -x release
The resulting install sets will be in the
/usr/obj/releasedir/ directory.
Copy the install kernel to the root directory of your NetBSD system,
reboot from it, and upgrade with sysinst
(see Chapter 4, Upgrading NetBSD).
The sysbuild and
sysupgrade tools (currently available in
pkgsrc/sysutils/sysbuild and
pkgsrc/sysutils/sysupgrade respectively) automate
the full process of rebuilding NetBSD from sources
(including the retrieval of the sources from a CVS
repository) and installing the results with minimal
effort.
Both of these tools have configuration files to determine how to
build a release and how to install it. Among other things, these
specify the CVS repository to use, what architecture to build for,
where to place the build files and what steps to perform during an
upgrade. The files can be found in
/usr/pkg/etc/sysbuild/default.conf and
/usr/pkg/etc/sysupgrade.conf. The default
configuration of both tools should let you get started with minimal
effort.
In their simplest form, you can do a full NetBSD build and upgrade your system to it by running these commands:
#sysbuild build#sysupgrade auto ~/sysbuild/release/$(uname -m)
And that's all that it takes. These invocations will do the following:
Download the source trees from CVS into
/usr/src and /usr/xsrc.
The latter is only fetched if your system has X11. And, if you
already have the sources in your system, this will only update
them to the newest version.
Build a new release into
~/sysbuild/<machine>/. This
per-machine directory will include subdirectories like
obj, destdir, etc. The
build results will be left in
~/sysbuild/release/<machine>/.
Install a new kernel and unpack the new sets using the just-built release files.
Run both etcupdate and postinstall to aid you in merging new configuration changes into your system.
For more details, please see the included sysbuild(1) and sysupgrade(8) manual pages, as well as the comments in the referenced configuration files.
The commands above depict the most basic and simple invocation
of the tools using the default configuration
files. One drawback is that you require root access
during the build of the source tree so that
sysbuild can upgrade the source trees
under /usr/src and
/usr/xsrc. It is recommended that you avoid
building as root once you are familiar with the procedure, and this
section show what is needed to do so with
sysbuild.
In order to build as non-root, you can either choose to store
your source trees out of /usr (easiest) or give
permissions to your user to modify the trees under
/usr (good if you want to share the source tree
with more than one user).
If you want to store the source trees under your home
directory, which is convenient for development purposes, simply edit
/usr/pkg/etc/sysbuild.conf and add these
settings:
SRCDIR="${HOME}/sysbuild/src"
[ ! -f /etc/mtree/set.xbase ] || XSRCDIR="${HOME}/sysbuild/xsrc"
Once this is done, the "sysbuild build" invocation show above should just work under your unprivileged user. The upgrade procedure then becomes:
$sysbuild build... become root ...#sysupgrade auto ~/sysbuild/release/$(uname -m)
The other alternative, in case you want to maintain your source trees in the locations described by hier(7), is to do the following as root:
#mkdir -p /usr/src /usr/xsrc#chown -R <your-user>:wsrc /usr/src /usr/xsrc... and optionally add <your-user> to wsrc in /etc/group ...
After this, the default configuration file of sysbuild will let you place the files in these locations and let you do unprivileged builds.
The pkgsrc/sysutils/sysbuild-user package
can be used to configure and maintain an unprivileged system user to
perform periodic (e.g. nightly) builds from source. This can come
in very handy to closely track NetBSD-current.
The installed user is appropriately named sysbuild, and is
configured by default to run a full system build overnight. The
results are left in
/home/sysbuild/release/<machine>/, which
is the convenient default of sysupgrade's
release directory. Any build failures will be reported to you by
email.
The behavior of sysbuild for this
unprivileged user is configured in
/home/sysbuild/default.conf.
You can interact with sysbuild under this unprivileged user by running commands of the form:
#su - sysbuild /usr/pkg/bin/sysbuild ...
etcupdate is a script to help users compare,
merge and install new configuration and startup files (files found in the etc.tgz
distribution set) in /dev, /etc and /root after performing an operating
system upgrade. The upgrade of the operating system could have
been performed either by compiling sources or by extracting
the distribution binaries.
In case where the sources are in /usr/src the following command should be enough:
#etcupdate
But what if your NetBSD sources are in an alternative location, such as
in /home/jdoe/netbsd/src? Don't worry, tell
etcupdate the location of your source tree with -s srcdir and it will work
just fine:
#etcupdate -s /home/jdoe/netbsd/src
Sometimes it's not convenient to have the sources around but you still want to update the configuration and startup files. The solution is to feed etc.tgz (or xetc.tgz) to etcupdate via the -s tgzfile switch.
#etcupdate -s /some/where/etc.tgz
The etcmanage perl script (available from
pkgsrc/sysutils/etcmanage
or as binary package) is an alternative to etcupdate.
It should be used in the following way, in combination with postinstall(8):
#/usr/pkg/bin/etcmanage#/usr/sbin/postinstall