Following OpenBSD-current snapshots

Table of Contents

Upgrade process #

At the boot prompt, boot with the bsd.rd kernel.

>> OpenBSD/amd64 BOOTX64 3.65
boot> boot bsd.rd

Choosing U for Upgrade and continue to the server path.

Type /pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64 to set the sets location.

This installs now the latest compiled system binaries built from the current OpenBSD source tree.

After the installation you can normally hit Enter to reboot your computer.

Finish the upgrade process by updating the userland packages/binaries with:

$ doas pkg_add -u

My thoughts #

I’m not sure where the exact difference is between this workflow and just using sysupgrade -s which should also update the base system to the latest available snapshot.

Another approach #

Using sysupgrade.

$ doas sysupgrade -s
Fetching from ftp://mirror.hs-esslingen.de/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64/
SHA256.sig   100% |*******************************|  2144       00:00
Signature Verified
INSTALL.amd64 100% |*****************************| 44856       00:00
base74.tgz   100% |******************************|   368 MB    00:40
bsd          100% |******************************| 24747 KB    00:04
bsd.mp       100% |******************************| 24859 KB    00:04
bsd.rd       100% |******************************|  4550 KB    00:01
comp74.tgz   100% |******************************| 75643 KB    00:09
game74.tgz   100% |******************************|  2748 KB    00:02
man74.tgz    100% |******************************|  7830 KB    00:01
xbase74.tgz  100% |******************************| 57139 KB    00:06
xfont74.tgz  100% |******************************| 22968 KB    00:03
xserv74.tgz  100% |******************************| 14951 KB    00:03
xshare74.tgz 100% |******************************|  4578 KB    00:01
Verifying sets.
Fetching updated firmware.
fw_update: add none; update none; keep intel,inteldrm,iwm,vmm
Upgrading.

The computer will reboot after the download.

Updating installed packages:

$ doas pkg_add -u

Whenever a new release appears (currently 7.4) you may need to add -D snap to the above command.

$ doas pkg_add -D snap -u
quirks-6.157 signed on 2023-09-29T21:02:26Z

Well, I usually reboot the laptop after this step just to be sure. Also my ~/.cache gets cleaned on reboot so also the Firefox cache gets cleaned (and others) in one run :)

$ shutdown -r now
Shutdown NOW!
shutdown: [pid: 50674]

System shutdown time has arrived
█

Computer reboots… and all should be fine again.