I'm in the process of setting up some "reference" machines at work; about the only "interesting" thing about them is that each is configured to be able to boot from any of the 4 MBR slices; I have a script for "cloning" one slice to another, at which point I can boot from the newly-populated slice and do a source upgrade -- and I can run tests (e.g., software builds) under each environment with fairly good confidence that -- save for external factors that aren't under my control -- I can compare results when booted from one slice vs. results when booted from a different slice.
After getting the 7.x machine set up, I effectively cloned it to be the starting-point for the 8.x machine. I then booted from a recent stable/7, updated sources to stable/8, then: * cd /usr/src * make buildworld * make kernel # I'm using GENERIC for 8.x; I had used MAC for 7.x * reboot to single user Well, I tried to. I got some fairly ugly errors trying to mount root -- and the KVM system at work, combined with no PS/2 keyboard ports on these machines conspired to render the machine completely non-responsive at this point. (And the only facility for capturing the screen content was as a JPEG image; I'm not willing to sned a JPEG image to -hackers@, and I'm not quite desperate enough to transcribe it by hand. If the following experiment fails similarly, I'll put the image up on my Web server somewhere.) I'm in the process of repeating the experiment, starting with upgrading from stable-7 r205655 to stable/7 r207388 first. If I should update sources to an earlier point for 8.x, I'd appreciate a "heads up" sooner, vs. later. :-} [I note that /usr/src/UPDATING labeled "stable/8/UPDATING 206382 2010-04-07 19:04:36Z ume" doesn't literally address the above; rather, it claims to have instructions (at the end) "To upgrade in-place from 5.x-stable to current" -- it might be a Nice Touch to update that before 8.1-RELEASE, I suspect.] Thanks! Peace, david -- David H. Wolfskill da...@catwhisker.org Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil. See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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