Re: what am I missing RE: freebsd-update?

On 2 December 2022 2:35:43 am AEDT, paul beard <paulbeard@gmail.com> wrote:
 > I am running 12.3-RELEASE-p6 and ran freebsd-update fetch and
 > freebsd-update install and I get this after the cycle ran:
 > 
 > No updates needed to update system to 12.3-RELEASE-p10.
 > No updates are available to install.

Looks like your previous update took userland to p10 already.

I'd not updated since 4th November and had seen the SA and errata the other day, so just did so:

# freebsd-version -kru
12.3-RELEASE-p6
12.3-RELEASE-p6
12.3-RELEASE-p10

So, no change to the installed or running kernel, just userland.

 > I have rebooted, thinking that it was necessary to load a new kernel
 > and
 > all the bits. Still on p6…

Yes.  To see the changes to userland for last several updates, I suggest:

# ls -lrtR /var/db/freebsd-update | less

 > I see this in /boot so something happened…I guess p10 was released on
 > Sep
 > 29?
 > drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel   20480 Sep 29 07:17 kernel
 > drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel   20480 Dec  1 06:52 kernel.old

No, going on mine I expect Sep 29 was when you last did an update that _did_ update the kernel (to -p6).  Here it's Sep 24, for a bunch of loader, boot and kernel files, and a few .ko in /boot/kernel/kernel

 > All new .ko stuff there as well. So why is the old kernel dated today
 > but
 > not what I assume to be the new one if all the ko files are dated
 > today.

File dates from ls are last modified, probably creation dates on your system, ie installation date.

I expect you'll find the latest file in kernel.old/ is '.freebsd-update', the addition of which of course updated the directory entry /boot/kernel.old/

 > How do I get freebsd-update to actually install updates? The man page
 > doesn't help me very much.

Again, see /var/db/freebsd-update

cheers, Ian