Upgrading FreeBSD 10.4-p13 to 11.2 with freebsd-update

By | November 14, 2018

Get the existing OS to date with both Kernel and packages.

  1. freebsd-update fetch install
  2. pkg update & pkg upgrade

Initial commands, to record what’s currently installed and tidy up caches etc

  1. portmaster –list-origins > ~/installed-port-list-`date “+%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S”`.txt
  2. portsnap fetch update
  3. portmaster -ty –clean-distfiles
  4. portmaster –check-port-dbdir
  5. portmaster -Faf

Upgrade the OS

This bit takes a while, about 20 minutes.

freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.2-RELEASE
root@hostname(/home/user)# freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.2-RELEASE
src component not installed, skipped
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... none found.
Fetching metadata signature for 10.4-RELEASE from update.FreeBSD.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Fetching 1 metadata patches. done.
Applying metadata patches... done.
Inspecting system... done.

The following components of FreeBSD seem to be installed:
kernel/generic world/base world/lib32

The following components of FreeBSD do not seem to be installed:
world/doc world/games

Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y

Fetching metadata signature for 11.2-RELEASE from update.FreeBSD.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Fetching 1 metadata patches. done.
Applying metadata patches... done.
Fetching 1 metadata files... done.

sds
You might be asked to confirm some merges. Do whats required. Once finished you’ll be told to run…

/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
This runs pretty quickly..

/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
src component not installed, skipped
Installing updates…
Kernel updates have been installed. Please reboot and run
“/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install” again to finish installing updates.

I got stuck in a reboot loop at this point. Recording my VM’s screen I spotted the following error…

module_register_init mod_load vesa error 19

I know I was loading the vesa module to get a better screen resolution on the console. To resolve the issue I booted off a FreeBSD bootonly ISO, mounted my root partition to /mnt and commented the line loading the vesa module out of /mnt/boot/loader.conf