Once every year I try to upgrade one of my virtual machine which is running NetBSD. This description is a short reminder for the major steps for the upgrade process.

System upgrade

The NetBSD system is upgraded by using the following command:

During the upgrade it will ask whether some system files have to be replaced, merged or kept unmodified.

GCC Ada Package Upgrade

The GCC Ada compiler is now based on GCC 4.9. I did the upgrade by using the following command:

The gprbuild package must also be upgrade:

And because I also use some other packages such as xmlada, the following package is also upgrade:

Before running an Ada program compiled by GCC 4.9

The GCC 4.9 Ada compiler works very well but it comes with a specific libgcc_s.so file installed in /usr/pkg/gcc-aux/lib. By default libgcc_s.so is installed on the system in /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so or /usr/pkg/lib/libgcc_s.so and they were compiled by GCC 4.5.3 or GCC 4.6.4.

If you use the wrong libgcc_s.so, the program will almost work except when a exception is raised: none of the exception can be caught and the program terminates as though there was no exception handler.

What happens is that the GCC 4.6 frame unwinder is unable to correctly identify the frames generated by GCC 4.9. The solution is of course to use the correct library and we can do this by setting the following environment variable before starting any program:

I'm using NetBSD for few years now but I've never took time to upgrade the system to a new version. To remember what I did for the upgrade, I've collected below the main steps.

Setup

The system upgrade can be made from the running NetBSD system by using the sysupgrade tool. I have installed the tool by using:

sudo pkgin install sysupgrade

Edit the file /usr/pkg/etc/sysupgrade.conf and setup the RELEASEDIR to point to the new release:

RELEASEDIR="ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.1.4/$(uname -m)"

NetBSD upgrade

Now, we just have to run the sysupgrade command to upgrade the base system and NetBSD kernel and then upgrade the packages by using the pkgin command.

sudo sysupgrade auto
sudo pkgin upgrade
sudo pkgin full-upgrade

And after the upgrade reboot the new kernel:

sudo shutdown -r now

After the recent announcement of the GCC 4.9 Ada compiler availability on FreeBSD by John Marino, I decided to do the upgrade and give it some try.

After a quick investigation, I´ve performed the following two simple steps on my FreeBSD host:

sudo pkg update
sudo pkg upgrade

Among several upgrade notifications, I've noted the following messages. The gcc-aux package corresponds to the GCC 4.9 compiler and the gnat-aux package contains the GCC 4.6.4 compiler.

Upgrading gcc-aux: 20130411_3 -> 20140416
Upgrading gnat-aux: 20130412_1 -> 20130412_2
Upgrading aws: 3.1.0.0 -> 3.1.0.0_2

The GCC 4.9 Ada compiler is located in /usr/local/gcc-aux/bin and the GCC 4.6.4 Ada compiler is located in /usr/local/bin.

Once the upgrade was finished, I've rebuilt all my FreeBSD jenkins projects and... it's done.

It worked so well that I wasn't sure whether the right compiler was used. Looking at the generated ALI file there was the V "GNAT Lib v4.9" tag that identifies the new compiler.

Next step is to perform a similar upgrade on NetBSD...

After upgrading my Ubuntu desktop with sudo apt-get upgrade, the X11 server was unable to start. Indeed, the AMD Catalyst driver was made unusable due to a missing symbol.

If this happens to you, check the file /var/log/kdm.log and if you see some error such as:

/usr/bin/X: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so: undefined symbol: GlxInitVisuals2D
xinit /etc/gdm/failsafeXinit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.failsafe -- /usr/bin/X  -br -once -config /etc/X11/xorg.conf.failsafe -logfil
e /var/log/Xorg.failsafe.log

Then you have to re-install the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver (AMD just released a new driver yesterday).

After re-installation and a reboot, the dual screen configuration was running again. To configure the dual screen, it may be necessary to launch the AMD Catalyst Control Center with:

$ sudo amdcccle

Check out my xorg.conf file in case of problem.

After the migration of your Symfony project from 1.1 to 1.2, you may get several errors about the setError and hasError method missing from the sfWebRequest class. Indeed, these operations have been removed. You can use the __sfCompat10Plugin_