Upgrade Gentoo FreeBSD 10.3 to 11.0

Preface

Now that we have successfully upgraded Gentoo FreeBSD from 9.1 to 10.3, we need to upgrade it to 11.0 in order to catch up the latest FreeBSD system. The major steps consist of the following:

• Upgrading world
• Changing to the new profile
• Upgrade the kernel
• Upgrade the userland
• Change CHOST and rebuild the toolchain

Let's start.

World upgrade

Remember to sync the repositories beforehand to make sure we're on the most recent version of the Portage tree.

emerge --sync
emerge -avuDN @world

Switch to the latest profile

eselect profile list
eselect profile set default/bsd/fbsd/amd64/11.0

Upgrade the kernel

It's important to upgrade the kernel first as some userland utilities may require the newer functions in the kernel.

emerge -a1 --nodeps sys-freebsd/freebsd-mk-defs
emerge -a1 --nodeps sys-freebsd/freebsd-sources
reboot

Check the running kernel by uname:

uname -a

Upgrade the FreeBSD userland

Check and remove strange flags from CFLAGS. The most basic configuration should consist of simply CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe".

vim /etc/portage/make.conf

Seems like GCC 6 doesn't play well when building freebsd-lib (here if you're interested), and we'll need sys-devel/gcc:5.4.0 for now.

emerge -av sys-devel/gcc:5.4.0
gcc-config -l
gcc-config 1

Upgrade the core libraries first.

emerge -a1 --nodeps sys-freebsd/freebsd-share sys-freebsd/freebsd-lib sys-freebsd/freebsd-libexec

Upgrade the rest of the userland.

emerge -a1uN boot0 freebsd-bin freebsd-lib freebsd-libexec freebsd-mk-defs freebsd-pam-modules freebsd-sbin freebsd-share freebsd-ubin freebsd-usbin

Re-merge all these packages once again as some of them require header files from 11.0, which aren't available before.

emerge -a1 boot0 freebsd-bin freebsd-lib freebsd-libexec freebsd-mk-defs freebsd-pam-modules freebsd-sbin freebsd-share freebsd-ubin freebsd-usbin

Change the CHOST variable and rebuild the toolchain

Edit /etc/portage/make.conf and change the CHOST variable from 10.3 to 11.0.

vim /etc/portage/make.conf
emerge -av1 binutils gcc

Make sure you use the correct version of binutils and gcc:

gcc-config -c
binutils-config -c

Rebuild world with the new toolchain:

emerge -a1 sys-devel/libtool
emerge -ae @world --exclude sys-apps/portage
emerge -a1 sys-apps/portage

If any of the packages fail to build you can resume the build, skipping that package with:

emerge -ar --skipfirst

Clean up

Rebuild packages with preserved libraries:

emerge @preserved-rebuild
dispatch-conf