OpenSolaris BFU b27

I've done it! Finally I've got some spare time to upgrade my Nevada b26 to OpenSolaris b27! I just can't wait to play with ZFS :)

I've done the upgrade using binaries - so I didn't have to compile anything this way, but instead simply downloaded BFU archives.

For those of you unfamiliar with BFU, it's a super-fast way to update your system. Naturally, it's less reliable than other standard ways to upgrade your system. But this is because it's much faster - a standard BFU image will be around 60-200Mb, which is nothing compared to the 3-4 ISO images of installation CDs you'll end up downloading from Sun if you want to have a standard upgrade reinstall. BFU archive is so small because essentially it is a set of system binaries with accompanying scripts. Only the necessary stuff. No packages - instead everything is split into archives of general purpose (generic.kernel, generic.lib, generic.root, generic.sbin, generic.usr) an a hardware platform-specific archives - for instance, SUNW,Netra-T12.root and
SUNW,Netra-T12.usr.

If you want to know more - I urge you to read a wonderful Open Solaris Developer's Guide in full.

Now, here's how I've upgraded my system:

1) Went to the "Sun Download Center" from this page - http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/ and downloaded two files:
opensolaris-bfu-20051116.sparc.tar.bz2 - that's the BFU archive itself - all the abovementioned files are here - your new kernel, necessary modules, new commands, etc for this new OpenSolaris build
SUNWonbld-20051116.sparc.tar.bz2 - a set of commands for ON building and installation - I only needed few files. In particular, I needed /opt/onbld/bin/bfu script which does the actual update.

2) Unpacked both archives and installed the SUNWonbld package. The first archive created an archives-20051116 directory for me.

3) Set up the environment variables required by /opt/onbld/bin/bfu script:


Added /opt/onbld/bin to my super-user PATH.

4) Started the actual update, specifying the FULL PATH to my BFU archive:
/opt/onbld/bin/bfu /export/dist/bfu/archives-20051116/sparc

If everything goes as it should, your system will spend quite some time updating itself - you'll see a list of updated sections and a list of conflicts will be shown as well.

You'll have an output of this installation in /tmp/bfu.out* file.

5) Now it's time to resolve our conflicts. Usually these are configuration files which already exist in your Solaris installation, but there are newer versions of them in your BFU archive. All the new versions you'll find in the /bfu.conflicts directory on your system, and the full list of conflicting files will be in the /bfu.conflicts/NEW file.

You'd better resovle all the conflicts BEFORE rebooting - your system may simply never come up if you bump into a particularly nasty conflict. Because of this, do read through the list of files and decide for yourself, how critical they are to you.

But before doing this - there's a better option. Simply start the /opt/onbld/bin/acr command, and it will analyze all your conflicting files and decide which ones are indeed critical for you. After your run this command, it will create a log file in /tmp directory, which will look like this (output is abridged):



So, if you have a zero returned after processing a particular file - it's nothing dangerous. I've had only zeroes everywhere, so I did reboot right away and held my breath, awaiting for my server to at least start responding to my pings. Luckily, everything went okay and my server came up shortly after this.

Well, that's all I have for the moment. Unfortunately, I didn't save my terminal history, so I couldn't demonstrate EVERY step of BFUing. But the next time I'm upgrading - I'll be sure to get back to this entry and update it with more info.

Good luck with your OpenSolaris upgrades!