Why Are You Using FreeBSD?

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 5/31/12 8:13 PM, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 31/05/2012 16:41, Damien Fleuriot wrote:
>> You missed the bit about 3 reboots, while these don't take 15 mins each,
>> they're still time consuming and disruptive.
>> 1/ reboot after installing new kernel
>> 2/ reboot after installing new world
>> 3/ reboot after rebuilding ports
> 
> If you rebuilt the ports first, then you'ld only have two reboots.
> 
> Also, while the cautious approach detailed in /usr/src/UPDATING is never
> wrong, much of the time you can do the upgrade perfectly well by
> installing world+kernel together and just rebooting once.  Obviously
> this is not a good idea if your machines are in a datacenter many miles
> away and you don't have console-equivalent access or if you're upgrading
> over a large delta in versions, or you're making major changes to the
> kernel config.
> 
> This sort of operation is something that ZFS boot environment support
> (recently committed to HEAD, due for MFC within the month) makes much,
> much safer and easier to deal with.  You don't need to do a separate
> reboot to test the kernel as you've still got an entire kernel+world in
> the previous BE to fall back on.
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew
> 

The reason I rebuild the ports last is because, unless I'm wrong, any
port that's statically linked to a system library would be linked to the
old library from the old world.


We've got very high HA constraints on these machines and I really prefer
doing this the cautious way.
Hell, on the first reboot I actually test the new kernel with "nextboot
-k" , even when doing 8.2-RELEASE -> 8-STABLE upgrades...


Regarding the ZFS boot thingy, I'm not comfortable enough with it to
push it in production, so we're still using UFS here.
Sure looks interesting though.