Re: FreeBSD 12.2 can not be upgraded

On Sun, 4 Sep 2022, David Christensen wrote:

> On 9/4/22 13:31, Paul Mather wrote:
>> I don't understand your comment about /rescue/sh in the first sentence
>> in the quoted paragraph above.  The binaries in /rescue are statically
>> linked, so I don't see how they depend on /libexec.  In fact, ldd will
>> even complain if you run it against /rescue/sh because it is not a
>> dynamically-linked executable.  Furthermore, file(1) will include
>> "statically linked" in its output when run against /rescue/sh.
>> (Disclaimer: I don't have any 12.x systems any more to double-check,
>> but it is true for FreeBSD 13.1 and historically has been the case for
>> as long as I know.  See man rescue(8) for details.)
>
> Here is what one of my 12.3-R systems has to say about /rescue/sh:
>
> 2022-09-04 22:08:51 dpchrist@f3 ~
> $ freebsd-version ; uname -a
> 12.3-RELEASE-p6
> FreeBSD f3.tracy.holgerdanske.com 12.3-RELEASE-p6 FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE-p6 
> GENERIC  amd64
>
> 2022-09-04 22:09:02 dpchrist@f3 ~
> $ ldd /rescue/sh
> ldd: /rescue/sh: not a dynamic ELF executable
>
> 2022-09-04 22:09:04 dpchrist@f3 ~
> $ file /rescue/sh
> /rescue/sh: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (FreeBSD), 
> statically linked, for FreeBSD 12.3, FreeBSD-style, stripped

I'm not a C guy and took the internals course a few decades ago so
basically no internals knowledge here. I can only report what I
experienced. The update 12.2-->12.3 introduced a copy of ld-elf.so.1 that
produced various errors. In this state there was a set of commands that
would not run. As this is a workstation I hit this a lot in the 9-11
versions of the system when trying to update xfce, firefox or installing
something like libreoffice. With the missing ".so" files in /usr/local I
was able to get by the error [sometimes] by replacing the offending module.
With ld-elf.so.1 it is protected by being read-only and with the immutable
bit set. So I went to single user mode and tried to update it. Basically a
no-go until I deleted it. Then nothing worked so I rebooted to single user
mode and tried to use /rescue/sh. That version was not [apparently]
statically linked. At any rate I got the same class of error. At this point
I had a rather expensive paper weight. Fairly easy to solve, boot from an
iso or img file, use livefs to save my data, and start a fresh.

I understand all my actions after the freebsd-update error were futile and
perhaps ill-advised, but what did I have to lose?