I cannot stress highly enough how important it is to take a backup of your system before you do this. While remaking the world is (as long as you follow these instructions) an easy task to do, there will inevitably be times when you make mistakes, or when mistakes made by others in the source tree render your system unbootable. Make sure you've taken a backup. And have a fixit floppy to hand. I've never needed to use them, and, touch wood, I never will, but it's always better to be safe than sorry. This document was written and tested with FreeBSD 2.1.7-RELEASE. That was a while ago (at the time of writing 2.2.5-RELEASE is perhaps 30 days away. Most of the information pertains to all versions of FreeBSD greater than 2.1. Where there are specific differences between versions (and where I'm aware of them) I'll note them. If you know of a difference between different versions that impacts on this document, please let me know. Examine the file /etc/make.conf. This contains some default defines for Everything is, by default, commented out. Uncomment those entries that look useful. For a typical user (not a developer), you'll probably want to uncomment the CFLAGS and NOPROFILE definitions. If your machine has a floating point unit (386DX, 486DX, Pentium and up class machines) then you can also uncomment the HAVE_FPU line. The 2>&1 construct is specific to the /bin/sh shell. Under /bin/csh you could use make world |& tee /var/tmp/mw.out Other shells have their own constructs to do the same thing. Alternatively, if you don't care to use shell redirection, you could use script to save a copy of all the output. script /var/tmp/mw.out Script started, output file is /var/tmp/mw.out … compile, compile, compile … Then go and make yourself several cups of tea. Remaking the world is a long process. One of our servers, a 200Mhz P6 with fairly run-of-the-mill SCSI disks, 64MB RAM and 256MB swap it takes a shade under two hours to complete. One of the 32MB (128MB swap), P133 machines takes about 5 hours. The only caveat I am aware of is that (at least the last few times I tried it with 2.1.5), Which means, whenever I have to install a new machine, I generally download the This may have changed up to 2.1.7. I unfortunately do not have the spare machines to test it. Although, in theory, nothing's going to touch this directory automatically, it's always better to be sure. So copy your existing /etc directory somewhere safe. Something like cp -rp /etc /etc.old will do the trick (-r does a recursive copy, -p preserves times, ownerships on files and suchlike). /var/tmp/root now contains all the files that should be placed in appropriate locations below /. You now have to go through each of these files, determining how they differ with your existing files. This is not a task that can be automated (at the moment). Note that some of the files that will have been installed in /var/tmp/root have a leading '.'. Make sure you use The simplest way to do this is to use the -c for the context output format, or -u for the unified output format. I find it easier to read context diffs. For example, diff -c /etc/shells /var/tmp/root/etc/shells will show you the differences between your /etc/shells file and the new /etc/shells file. Use these to decide whether to merge in changes that you've made or whether to copy over your old file. When it comes to /var/tmp/root/dev, you should just copy over the You will use those scripts a little later to update your /dev directory. Here is a (probably incomplete) list of files that you will probably want to merge or copy by hand. namedb/* ppp/* That is not an exhaustive list, and changes to FreeBSD in the future may necessitate moving files from the Those filenames shown in Starting with FreeBSD 2.2.2-RELEASE, For safety's sake, this is a multistep process. You should already have copied in the /dev. Do the following, ls -la /dev > /var/tmp/dev1.out ls -la /var/tmp/root/dev > /var/tmp/dev2.out This gives you a reference for when things go wrong… Run a quick diff over these two files to see if anything's missing. If you use slices in your disk partitioning (which may not be necessary on a dangerously dedicated disk) then these slices have almost certainly not been made. Note down the devices that exist in Now do, cd /dev sh MAKEDEV all This will generate all the standard devices. You must now do whatever's necessary to recreate devices that you noticed as missing in the previous step. For my setup, that involved doing sh MAKEDEV sd0s1a sh MAKEDEV sd1s1a to create the slice entries on my two disks. Your circumstances may vary. If at all in doubt, make sure you have a handy boot and fixit floppy, and a very recent backup of your system. You should now have successfully upgraded your FreeBSD system. Congratulations. It's likely that over the next few days you'll notice little oddities that don't work as expected, or small upgrades you've forgotten to do. Something I missed for several days was that /etc/magic was missing. It was only when I went to run /usr/src/usr.bin/file sorted that one out. This is normally indicative of hardware problems. (Re)making the world is an effective way to stress test your hardware, and will frequently throw up memory problems. These normally manifest themselves as the compiler mysteriously dieing on receipt of strange signals. A sure indicator of this is if you can restart the make and it dies at a different point in the process. In this instance there is little you can do except start swapping around the components in your machine to determine which one is failing. That depends on how you want to make the world on future occasions. /usr/obj contains all the object files that were produced during the compilation phase. Normally, one of the first steps in the /usr/obj around after you've finished makes little sense, and will free up a large chunk of disk space (currently about 150MB). However, if you know what you're doing you can have If you want to live dangerously then make the world, passing the make -DNOCLEAN world This depends on how far through the process you got before you found a problem. In general (and this is not a hard and fast rule) the make world process builds new copies essential tools (such as gcc, and make) and the system libraries. These tools and libraries are then installed. The new tools and libraries are then used to rebuild themselves, and are installed again. The entire system (now including regular user programs, such as ls or grep) is then rebuilt with the new system files. If you're at the last state, and you know it (because you've looked through the output that you were storing) then you can (fairly safely) do … fix the problem … cd /usr/src which will not undo the work of the previous make world. If you see the message -------------------------------------------------------------- Building everything.. -------------------------------------------------------------- in the make world output then it's probably fairly safe to do so. If you don't see that message, or you're not sure, then it's always better to be safe than sorry, and restart the build from scratch. My FreeBSD 2.2.2-RELEASE system shows a reinstall target in /usr/src/Makefile. The comment for this includes: # reinstall # # If you have a build server, you can NFS mount the source and obj directories # and do a 'make reinstall' on the *client* to install new binaries from the # most recent server build. I have no idea how well this works, or whether it is present in earlier versions of FreeBSD. I mention it here for completeness. The following people have contributed to this document in some form or another. Either by directly suggesting alterations and improvements, or by their messages to the FreeBSD mailing lists, from which I have shamelessly cribbed information. My thanks to them. Kees Jan Koster, <kjk1@ukc.ac.uk> A Joseph Kosy, <koshy@india.hp.com> Greg Lehey, <grog@lemis.com> Wes Peters, <softweyr@xmission.com> Joseph Stein, <joes@joes.users.spiritone.com>