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Tim Ch-AI-se (now with bonus spooky) 👻gumnos@bsd.cafe
Aug 7, 2026, 3:57 PM
some days I wish upgrading #FreeBSD was as mindless as upgrading my #OpenBSD machines.
On OpenBSD, it's generally `sysupgrade`, let it do its thing, rebooting itself a couple times (entering my FDE passwords as necessary), and then a `pkg_add -u` to upgrade my packages. Sometimes a `sysmerge` if it can't do it automatically. But very much two (or three) idiot-proof commands with very little demand on this idiot's brain to recall where I am in the process.
While I like the automatic ZFS boot-environment snapshotting, FreeBSD requires me to know the next version-number I want to upgrade to (can't determine it or prompt me for viable options?), transcribe it as part of the upgrade command, then manually running `freebsd-update install` multiple times, rebooting manually multiple times between each, then `pkg update` and a `pkg upgrade` to update userspace. I'm sitting at a login…is this the first, second, or third reboot? I don't know, it was taking a while and I ended up wandering off to do something else.
This post brought to you by this morning's 14.3→14.4 FreeBSD upgrade 😆
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Replies

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
Aug 7, 2026, 4:08 PM
@gumnos
FreeBSD has infrastructure in the rc system to run things automatically on the next boot. I wish freebsd-update / pkg used this to automatically run the after-the-reboot stage and had a flag for 'just reboot when you need to'.
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Darren Moffatdarrenmoffat@mastodon.social
Aug 7, 2026, 6:06 PM
@gumnos which is why on #solaris it is just ‘pkg update’ that creates the new ZFS clone using metadata from pkg to name it after the release you are updating to eg 11.4.93.221.1 it adds a GRUB entry and it is one reboot. Or just enable the auto-update service and set when you want it to happen and what notification hooks to run before the reboot. You can run beadm and create it but you don’t need to. Updates every two weeks for me like that (internal builds not public SRUs of 11.4)
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