FreeBSD 8.1-BETA1 released

The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for several architectures.

If you are updating an already running machine the CVS branch tag is RELENG_8, or if you prefer SVN use “stable/8”. Updates done that way will result in a machine that says it is running “8.1-PRERELEASE”.

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 8.0-RELEASE can upgrade as follows:

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.1-BETA1

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components, and the system needs to be rebooted again:

# freebsd-update install
# shutdown -r now

Users of earlier FreeBSD releases (FreeBSD 7.x) can also use freebsd-update to upgrade to FreeBSD 8.1-BETA1, but will be prompted to rebuild all third-party applications (e.g., anything installed from the ports tree) after the second invocation of “freebsd-update install”, in order to handle differences in the system libraries between FreeBSD 7.x and FreeBSD 8.x.