The Blog of Ben Rockwood

Stay Current with OpenSolaris The Easy Way: BFU Upgrades

26 Mar '07 - 02:24 by benr

We're very lucky in the OpenSolaris community to have a variety of ways to stay current. They include:

Mercurial (SCM) Access: hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/onnv/onnv-gate
Regular Full Code Drops: OpenSolaris Download Center, including BFU Archives (Binary) and Source
Solaris Express, both Community Edition each new build and Developer Edition released quarterly.

Thats a lot of choice which is a estimate to the hard work of the guys at Sun and particularly Steve Lau.

Personally I'm big on BFU Archives for quick upgrades and functionality testing, and then using Community Edition for deployment because its all ready for Jumpstart configurations.

Are you BFU upgrading your home dev boxes? Its easy:

Go to the OpenSolaris Download Center and download the BFU Archives and ON Specific Build Tools. Thats all you need.

Unpack and install the SUNWonbld package. If you have an old version, uninstall it first:

root@aeon $ tar xfvj SUNWonbld-20060828.i386.tar.bz2
root@aeon$ cd onbld
root@aeon onbld$ pkgrm SUNWonbld
root@aeon onbld$ pkgadd -d . SUNWonbld
...
root@aeon onbld$ cd ../

Unpack the BFU Archives:

root@aeon $ tar xfvj on-bfu-20060828.i386.tar.bz2
...

Now define the following environmental variables:

export FASTFS=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/fastfs
export BFULD=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/bfuld
export GZIPBIN=/usr/bin/gzip
export PATH=/opt/onbld/bin:/opt/onbld/bin/i386:$PATH

Now shutdown your important apps, be ready to reboot your system, and execute the bfu command with the full path to the archives:
```
root@aeon $ bfu /home/benr/OpenSolaris/archives-20070228/i386/
...
```
When it completes, run the acr command with full path:
```
# /opt/onbld/bin/acr
```
As soon as this is done, if nothing looks majorly out of place, reboot the system.

This process works well, is easy, and you can upgrade your system while planning your day. Just remember to keep your system fairly up to date. Doing upgrades over long spans of time can cause issues (Find out exactly why here). But, so far in all my upgrades I've only had a single BFU upgrade go bad and it was going from B41 to B49 in a "if it fails, oh well" attempt. If your smart and putting all your important data on ZFS you have little to worry about if an upgrade goes bad anyway... just reinstall the system and import your filesystems. All hail ZFS!

If you haven't tried a BFU upgrade yet I highly encourage you to gather the courage and give it a try. The procedure above is the exactly one I use time after time. I just upgraded this afternoon before putting the kids down for their naps and am happily running B61 now.

- - C O M M E N T S - -
Thanks for this handy guide. BFUing from a tar achive sure beats building from scratch.

Red Beard - 26 March '07 - 11:09

So wait, OpenSolaris has no automatic update method? No yum or apt? Really?

What about Solaris?

I’ve been watching [Open]Solaris a lot from the Linux side of the fence lately, and really want to know.

Brett - 26 March '07 - 11:47

Brett, there’s Blastwave, which is like apt, but only for additional applications, not the core OS. For now you can do a BFU or upgrade from DVD/CD when a new SXCE is released.

Geoff (Email) - 26 March '07 - 17:06

NexentaOS does apt-get for everything and offers 12000+ pre-built applications

Erast - 27 March '07 - 00:47

Of course, extra points for using zfs-mountroot and shameless plug mountrootadm.
[[http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_mo..]]

Being able to have the same system with as many different bfu images as you can fit on a zpool is really nice, and a happy taste of things to come once LiveUpgrade gets ZFS-enlightened :-)

Tim Foster (Email) (URL) - 27 March '07 - 09:52

While BFU is nice for what it does, it is most definitely not keeping you current with Solaris Express, as BFU updates only the bits created by the OS/Net consolidation, which means you’re not upgrading the bits procvided bythe other consolidations (18 or so at last count) which make up a Solaris Express release.

If you really want to stay current with Solaris Express, upgrades (especially Live Upgrade) are the only reasonable path.

Dave Miner (Email) (URL) - 27 March '07 - 11:22

tar xvfj….....????is there is an option of j ?????
or it is tar xvfi….......................?
but i still got the error showing that directory checksum error
help!!!!!!!!

kingmmx (Email) - 13 July '07 - 12:51

If you have pkg-get installed for OpenSolaris, it’s even more trivial:

pkg-get install onbld

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