> Upgrading Tribblix

From time to time, a new version of Tribblix will be made available. This will update to a more recent build of illumos, and will also update applications to match.

The first thing to do is to keep Tribblix up to date. If you're fully up to date (zap refresh and zap update-overlay -a) then you can check for available upgrades with:

This will return one or more lines of output, showing the current version and any other versions available for upgrade. For example:

m30: (current)

Shows you that you're currently running the m30 release, and there are no upgrades available. If it says:

m30: (current)
m31: Tribblix m31

Then that's an indication that there's a new version - in this case m31 - available that you can upgrade to. You don't have to upgrade, but it's often a good idea.

What you'll also see from the above output is that there may be multiple newer versions available to you. There's also a minor distinction between update releases within a stream, and going to a new version.

• An update release - such as m25.3 - shares the application updates with all the other update releases in that stream. In other words, from the point of view of applications, running an update will give you exactly the same application versions as an upgrade.
• A full release - such as m31 - will have a different set of application updates. In particular, it may introduce completely new applications, and application updates that are incompatible will tend to occur at a full release boundary. In fact, it's the need to make incompatible changes that drives full releases as opposed to update releases, as a full release can establish a new baseline of application versions.

Once a new full release has been made, application updates for the old release will stop relatively quickly (although application updates for security issues will continue a while longer), and the focus will shift to only updating applications for the new release.

You can upgrade directly to any release listed. You don't have to go through any intermediate releases.

To actually perform the upgrade, run the following command, with the version you want to upgrade to:

This will take a few minutes. It will create a clone of your current system, and update all the software on that clone to the correct version. Once it's done, you'll see a message similar to the following:

=====================================================
|| To switch to the newly upgraded version, issue  ||
|| the following commands:                         ||
||   beadm activate m31                            ||
||   init 6                                        ||
=====================================================

If you're happy, then issue the two commands shown, and the system will reboot, and you'll be running the newly upgraded version of Tribblix.

Managing multiple versions

Once you've upgraded, the old version of Tribblix is still present. In illumos, you can have multiple boot environments. The upgrade process clones the running system to a new boot environment, and upgrades that rather than attempting to upgrade the running system in place, which is much safer.

You can see which boot environments are present on your system with the command:

which will return something similar to the following:

BE  Active Mountpoint Space  Policy Created
m30 -      -          15.84M static 2023-05-03 21:00
m31 NR     /          25.30G static 2023-07-10 15:17

Here I have 3 boot environments. The current one is called m31 - the NR in the Active column shows that it's being used now ("N") and will be used if the system reboots ("R"). I also have an older boot environment, m30, so you can see the upgrade path.

If, for some reason, you want to use one of the older boot environments (for example, you've upgraded and something doesn't quite work correctly), then you need to activate it:

and then reboot.

You can also list and select boot environments from the boot loader screen.

Old boot environments do take up space - they are, after all, a copy of the operating system. Once you're sure that you won't need to go back, you can delete them. For example:

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