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To: Nik Clayton <nik@blueberry.co.uk>
Cc: questions@freebsd.org, jfieber@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: "make world" and re-making the kernel 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 26 Jun 1997 10:13:56 +0100."
             <19970626101356.13640@blueberry.co.uk> 
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 1997 17:56:56 +0530
From: A Joseph Koshy <koshy@india.hp.com>
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>>>> "Nik Clayton" <nik@blueberry.co.uk> writes

Hi Nik,

I noticed that there was no response to your query from -questions ... 
perhaps you may have better luck with -hackers ...

nc> [Talking about http://www-local/technical/freebsd/upgrading-from-src.html]

jk> Basically I wanted to say that its recommended to rebuild/install the new
jk> kernel before doing the reboot step in "8".

nc> Is it? I was under the impression that it's better off to reboot the
nc> system, so that all your 'make world' changes have definitely taken effect,
nc> and then re-build the kernel.

nc> Copied to -questions for informed comment.

Heres my rationale for my statement:

Rebooting with a new `world' but an old kernel can be dangerous, because
many of the system utilities may break:

(a) ps, ifconfig, sysctl etc. can fail to work properly, leaving the machine 
    off the network or worse ...
(b) worse, basic utilities like `mount' can fail leaving you unable to
    mount `/usr' or even `/' (this happened to me once when Lite2 was being
    merged in) ...
(c) I don't use LKMs but I can envisage a scenario where an old kernel
    may crash with a newer LKM built during a make world.

Having been bitten by (a) and (b) I now try to keep /kernel in sync with
the world.

The larger the gap between your current source base and the new `world', the
greater your likely exposure to problems of this nature.

Regards,
Koshy