Re: Manual upgrade using base.txz

On 2024-09-30 12:56, Dave Cottlehuber wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024, at 14:37, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
>> you any idea how far back this might work? Like dumping 14 on a
>> ten-year-old AMD64 install? I can, of course, copy the drives and
>> experiment if no one else has.
> 
> I would expect the password files not to be directly compatible, and
> probably a few other things like sshd_config would be out of date too.
> 
> Either way I think you should have a crack and report back just how
> bad the breakage is :-).
> 
> 10 years ago would be 9.x approx, a great deal has changed, hopefully
> for the better. The zfs pool layout is different now too, IIRC, so
> boot environments might not work OOTB.
> 
> I would be concerned about being easily able to revert, for example.
> 
> You could test the waters by installing 14.1-RELEASE onto a USB stick
> or external drive, and seeing if you can use that boot loader, to
> boot the older version or not.
> 
> good luck!

Good luck is probably right! These would be UFS2, not ZFS. I can see 
that being a problem, but I can't explain exactly where the problem 
would lie. If the disk bootstraps an 8.3 /boot/kernel/kernel it should 
go right ahead anything in that place on the disk, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reverting won't be a problem - I'd copy the entire disk first (actually 
they're usually mirrored using geom).

Where most of the stuff is running in jails anyway, updating the kernel 
and base shouldn't involve changing a lot of config files, and things 
like sshd_config won't have changed much.

passwd? Hmm. Good point - I can vipw and copy/paste.

When I get around to this I'll report back. I may be grumpy.

Regards, Frank.