From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Nov 13 14:21:31 2012 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C9634959 for ; Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:21:31 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@qeng-ho.org) Received: from blue.qeng-ho.org (blue.qeng-ho.org [217.155.128.241]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 541358FC08 for ; Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:21:30 +0000 (UTC) Received: from fileserver.home.qeng-ho.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fileserver.home.qeng-ho.org (8.14.5/8.14.5) with ESMTP id qADELSpe015524; Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:21:28 GMT (envelope-from freebsd@qeng-ho.org) Message-ID: <50A25768.9040208@qeng-ho.org> Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:21:28 +0000 From: Arthur Chance User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20121029 Thunderbird/16.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Leslie Jensen Subject: Re: Some thoughts about upgrading from 8.3 to 9.1 References: <50A2445F.7040602@eskk.nu> In-Reply-To: <50A2445F.7040602@eskk.nu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: FreeBSD Questions X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:21:31 -0000 On 11/13/12 13:00, Leslie Jensen wrote: > > I just read in another post about disklayout > _____________________________________________________________ > According to the manual as of 9.0-RELEASE the default fragment > and block sizes for newfs are 4k and 32k, so provided your > partitions/slices are 4k aligned everything Should Just Work. > Before 9.0 fragments and blocks were 2k and 16k which doesn't > play so well with 4k drives. > ____________________________________________________________ I wrote that. It's only relevant if you have recent disks with 4k hardware blocks. If you have, you ought to use 4k/16k filesystems whatever your OS rev. If you haven't, it doesn't matter. If it's not broken, don't fix it, is a very good principle. > I started thinking about the choices I have for upgrading my running 8.3 > systems. > > I'm aware about of the procedure with freebsd-upgrade and rebuilding all > ports according to man portmaster. > > > Would you just do the upgrade or would you consider reinstalling? > > Would it be beneficial to make a fresh installation? Like Erich Dollansky, I prefer to upgrade via source, but that's because I like tweaking my system in mildly non-standard ways. (More a habit than a necessity, but I've been doing it since 6th Edition Unix. :-) If you're running a vanilla install with GENERIC kernel freebsd-upgrade is probably going to be quicker even if you've got a multicore monster to recompile on. Just make sure you can reinstall if something goes bad during the upgrade and *back up anything vital first*.