At 11:04 PM -0400 7/16/02, John Mills wrote: >Hello - > >I would appreciate a bit more information on the 'world' and 'kernel' >building process. Please point me at the right section of the Handbook >or Greg's book if there is a succinct description. > >I have been doing 'CVSUP' followed by: > ># make buildworld ># make installworld ># make buildkernel ># make installkernel > >without really knowing if this was a useful order or exactly what >I was accomplishing with each target.
You should check: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html for more details that you probably even need to know (because it includes information for older releases of freebsd). If you are fairly up-to-date with freebsd-stable, the preferred order would be more like: *READ* /usr/src/UPDATING [every time, just to make sure there are no special issues with this specific snapshot of freebsd] mergemaster -p make buildworld make buildkernel make installkernel [reboot, to make sure the kernel at least boots up] get into single user mode [usually by booting into it in the above step, although I often cheat on that...] make installworld mergemaster [go thru all the questions from mergemaster] reboot into your new world. You do not want to install the new world before you know whether the kernel that matches it will work on your hardware. If the kernel does *not* work (and I have had cases where this happens, although not very often on freebsd-stable), then you can easily back out by just renaming the kernel-related files in '/'. If you have done the installworld and *then* find out the new kernel does not work, well, you'll be in a world of hurt. Many people will try things in a different order, and will happen to have it work, and will thus insist that their order is the correct order (and usually "that it saves them a lot of time"). Their order may even work for six to eight months at a stretch, which they consider "proof" that it is a perfectly correct order. The documented order is the order you should stick with, because it's the only order that we actively *try* to keep working. If some other order happens to work, feel free to use it, but do not come complaining to us for the update where that alternate order does NOT happen to work... -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
