How to manage upgrades?

jclark · 2015-05-26 09:09:13

Hi,

I like Arch, it stays nice and current, but upgrades occasionally break my system, and when that happens it seems to take a long time for me to recover. How do other people manage?

The latest problem occurred upgrading to linux 4.0.4-2, and I ended up (with no error messages from the upgrade) with a kernel on 4.0.4-1 but modules for 4.0.4-2. That caused various systemd units to fail, the most critical one being the network. Eventually a simple re-install of linux-4.0.4-2 fixed the various problems I had spent time investigating, but it took a while to get there.

Is there some simple upgrade process which will allow me to fall back to yesterday's system when it breaks, without doing an enormous backup job before upgrading?

My memory of Ubuntu is that it was almost always possible to boot back into yesterday's kernel after an upgrade. Booting into the recovery initramfs doesn't seem to be useful - it has never helped me.

Thanks.

Trilby · 2015-05-26 10:12:52

There are some issues that may arrise from upgrades - but in my history of using arch they are so very very rare that I need no contingency plan for it. I just deal with it when it happens (or delt with it the one time it happened). You mention the kernel issues, and ubuntu's approach to that is specific to the kernel and would not apply to any other package: they just keep old kernels around ... perhaps indefinitely until you delete them. With arch this would be ridiculous, your boot partition would quickly swell to an unmanageable size.

Also, for the specific example you describe there are only two ways for that to happen: either the mirror you are using is 'broken' and poorly managed, and you should select a different mirror, or you are doing partial upgrades. What commands did you use to get mismatching kernel and modules?

WorMzy · 2015-05-26 10:17:58

Hi jclark, welcome to Arch.

The latest problem occurred upgrading to linux 4.0.4-2, and I ended up (with no error messages from the upgrade) with a kernel on 4.0.4-1 but modules for 4.0.4-2.

The only ways that can happen is if you don't have your boot partition mounted when you upgrade, or your bootloader is actually installed to your root partition, and you had a superfluous partition mounted to /boot. Alternatively, if you boot with UEFI you possibly forgot to copy the kernel over to your ESP (if you've set it up so that this is necessary). Make sure your fstab is correct.

The thing about updates is that you should install them as soon as you have time to. Things might break (but it's very rare that they do), and you will need time to fix them. So don't 'pacman -Syu' when you have an important dissertation to write, do it when you have a couple of hours to spare. Once a week is fine, or possibly every other week. I personally update every other day on my personal machine, once a week on my work machine, and whenever I remember to on my netbook.

Arch updates kernels in place, so you can't easily boot the previous kernel, but you can install a secondary kernel, for example linux-lts.

There is no recovery initramfs. There is just the normal one (which is optimised for your machine's hardware at the point it was made), and the fallback one, which should support all hardware (useful if you need to boot your installation on another set of hardware for some reason).

Alad · 2015-05-26 11:32:50

Besides the valuable advice given above, I'll plug for the arch rollback machine:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ar … ck_Machine

It's a mirror snapshot and allows to install new software without a prior full system upgrade (partial upgrades are unsupported in Arch).

You also want to get intricate with makepkg and PKGBUILD, to for example quickly apply a patch not merged upstream or in the repositories yet. See their respective man pages for details.

PS: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/En … _stability

Last edited by Alad (2015-05-26 11:37:58)

mauritiusdadd · 2015-05-26 15:08:00

Maybe I'm just lucky but, to be sincere, in the two and half year that I'm using Arch I never encountered any critical issue when updating my system. Sometimes it could happen that something "breaks", but the most of the times it's my fault (for example, today I upgrade to systemd 220 and I forgot to update my custom scancodes-to-keycodes mapping rule to use the new udev ABI).

Besides to the above advices, I can only suggest you to updated often and never do partial upgrades. If you have a problem after an update and you want simply to downgrade a package for testing purpose, you can reinstall the older version of a package from the pacman cache https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Do … l_packages.

In the end, I can only agree with Trilby: breakages that mess up your system are so rare that it is best to deal with them when/if they happen.

Last edited by mauritiusdadd (2015-05-26 15:09:06)

neng · 2015-05-26 20:51:57

I've been using Arch since 2005. And critical upgrade issues did happen to me several times. The most recent one is this:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=197626

I am using Arch mostly via Virtualbox on Windows host (company platform). This brings an advantage that I can just backup the VM before important upgrade. I am doing yaourt -Syu daily on my Arch VM. So when an issue happen, there are usually not too many packages to screen for the culprit, like I did in the above most recent case.

Before (2 years ago?), pacman had an option to alert you that some specified packages need upgrade. So I stopped the upgrade, did a backup of the VM first, then continued upgrade. Nowadays, I have to manually watching for those critical packages (such as Linux, X11, Virtualbox, etc.) and take the backup-before-upgrade approach.

Alad · 2015-05-26 22:14:07

neng wrote:

Before (2 years ago?), pacman had an option to alert you that some specified packages need upgrade. So I stopped the upgrade, did a backup of the VM first, then continued upgrade. Nowadays, I have to manually watching for those critical packages (such as Linux, X11, Virtualbox, etc.) and take the backup-before-upgrade approach.

You can still do that, by adding those packages to Ignore = in /etc/pacman.conf. Of course, don't forget to press Y to actually update.

jclark · 2015-05-27 11:31:27

Trilby wrote:

Also, for the specific example you describe there are only two ways for that to happen: either the mirror you are using is 'broken' and poorly managed, and you should select a different mirror, or you are doing partial upgrades. What commands did you use to get mismatching kernel and modules?

Thank you to everybody for the various comments.

The command I used was "yaourt -Syyu". The repositories are

Server = http://mirror.one.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
Server = http://mirror.js-webcoding.de/pub/archl … o/os/$arch
Server = http://archlinux.polymorf.fr/$repo/os/$arch
Server = rsync://mirror.js-webcoding.de/pub/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
Server = rsync://mirror.one.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch

I don't recall where I got those from, but I think I ran a tool which generated that list for me. Perhaps I need to change them.

There is a separate /boot, but it was mounted at the time, so I am a little mystified about how it happened.

neng · 2015-05-27 17:38:27

Alad wrote:

neng wrote:
Before (2 years ago?), pacman had an option to alert you that some specified packages need upgrade. So I stopped the upgrade, did a backup of the VM first, then continued upgrade. Nowadays, I have to manually watching for those critical packages (such as Linux, X11, Virtualbox, etc.) and take the backup-before-upgrade approach.
You can still do that, by adding those packages to Ignore = in /etc/pacman.conf. Of course, don't forget to press Y to actually update.

The IgnorePkg option is not what I want because I need those packages to be upgraded, not ignore them. However, I just need to do a backup before upgrading them.

The old option of pacman I mentioned is this:

# If upgrades are available for these packages they will be asked for first
# SyncFirst = pacman linux xorg-server virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-modules unison

Alad · 2015-05-27 17:52:40

neng wrote:

The IgnorePkg option is not what I want because I need those packages to be upgraded, not ignore them. <snip>

Read my comment properly (and try what it suggests) before dismissing it. Ignore asks if you want to upgrade a package.

Last edited by Alad (2015-05-27 17:56:39)

nstgc · 2015-05-28 01:12:30

I make daily system snapshots, as well as a daily and weekly offline back up. In most cases I can roll back the snap shot (btrfs). Otherwise I nuke the partition and rsync the backup.

jasonwryan · 2015-05-28 01:54:51

jclark wrote:

The command I used was "yaourt -Syyu"

So your issue is not with pacman at all...

neng · 2015-05-28 16:07:24

Alad wrote:

neng wrote:
The IgnorePkg option is not what I want because I need those packages to be upgraded, not ignore them. <snip>
Read my comment properly (and try what it suggests) before dismissing it. Ignore asks if you want to upgrade a package.

For testing, I added this to pacman.conf:

# Pacman won't upgrade packages listed in IgnorePkg and members of IgnoreGroup
IgnorePkg = git

Then run "yaourt -Suy". The latest git package was not even mentioned in the result of yaourt.

:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
multilib is up to date
archlinuxfr is up to date
Foreign packages: | 4 / 4

==> Package upgrade only (new release):
core/iproute2 4.0.0-1 1 -> 2

==> Software upgrade (new version) :
core/libutil-linux 2.26.1-3 -> 2.26.2-1
core/curl 7.42.0-1 -> 7.42.1-1
core/util-linux 2.26.1-3 -> 2.26.2-1
extra/xkeyboard-config 2.14-1 -> 2.15-1

==> Continue upgrade ? [Y/n]
==> [V]iew package detail [M]anually select packages
==> --------------------------------------------------
==> n

Then run "pacman -Suy"

[neng@dolphin:~]$ sudo pacman -Suy
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
multilib is up to date
archlinuxfr is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
warning: git: ignoring package upgrade (2.4.1-1 => 2.4.2-1)
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (5) curl-7.42.1-1 iproute2-4.0.0-2 libutil-linux-2.26.2-1 util-linux-2.26.2-1 xkeyboard-config-2.15-1

Total Download Size: 3.68 MiB
Total Installed Size: 17.55 MiB
Net Upgrade Size: 0.05 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

As shown here, pacman only gives a warning about git being ignored. The "[Y/n]" answer is not related to git being ignored.

Am I missing anything? Thanks.

jasonwryan · 2015-05-28 17:00:15

neng wrote:

Am I missing anything? Thanks.

Code tags: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … s_and_code

twelveeighty · 2015-05-29 00:53:49

neng wrote:

Am I missing anything?

I don't think you're picking up the patience running out with the Archers trying to help you here, so I'll try to jump in with more direct advise:

1) do not use yaourt. It's an opinion that's shared among a lot of Archers, search on the forums to find out why we don't use it
2) if all you want is a heads-up warning that a package was updated, either do it manually, just like (probably) most of us: check the package listing that pacman -Syu gives you and take action accordingly, or Google "arch linux rss feed parser". I'm sure there'll be something out there that works with the RSS feed. If not, build it yourself; if you can't, maybe adjust your expectations or reconsider if Arch is the distro for you.

jasonwryan · 2015-05-29 01:03:35

twelveeighty wrote:

2) if all you want is a heads-up warning that a package was updated, either do it manually, just like (probably) most of us: check the package listing that pacman -Syu gives you and take action accordingly

Or use one of pacman's tools to do it for you:

checkupdates --help

neng · 2015-05-29 15:57:09

jasonwryan wrote:

neng wrote:
Am I missing anything? Thanks.
Code tags: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … s_and_code

Thanks for the tip. Will do accordingly next time.

neng · 2015-05-29 16:04:47

twelveeighty wrote:

neng wrote:
Am I missing anything?
I don't think you're picking up the patience running out with the Archers trying to help you here, so I'll try to jump in with more direct advise:
1) do not use yaourt. It's an opinion that's shared among a lot of Archers, search on the forums to find out why we don't use it
2) if all you want is a heads-up warning that a package was updated, either do it manually, just like (probably) most of us: check the package listing that pacman -Syu gives you and take action accordingly, or Google "arch linux rss feed parser". I'm sure there'll be something out there that works with the RSS feed. If not, build it yourself; if you can't, maybe adjust your expectations or reconsider if Arch is the distro for you.

1) yaourt works fine for me. Sorry, no time to do the search as you suggested.

2) In my previous comments I already mentioned that I had been doing what you suggested: check the package listing that pacman -Syu gives you and take action accordingly.

Please re-consider words like "maybe adjust your expectations or reconsider if Arch is the distro for you". I am still patient after using Arch for 10 years.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-05-26 09:09:13

How to manage upgrades?

#2 2015-05-26 10:12:52

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#3 2015-05-26 10:17:58

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#4 2015-05-26 11:32:50

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#5 2015-05-26 15:08:00

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#6 2015-05-26 20:51:57

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#7 2015-05-26 22:14:07

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#8 2015-05-27 11:31:27

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#9 2015-05-27 17:38:27

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#10 2015-05-27 17:52:40

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#11 2015-05-28 01:12:30

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#12 2015-05-28 01:54:51

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#13 2015-05-28 16:07:24

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#14 2015-05-28 17:00:15

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#15 2015-05-29 00:53:49

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#16 2015-05-29 01:03:35

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#17 2015-05-29 15:57:09

Re: How to manage upgrades?

#18 2015-05-29 16:04:47

Re: How to manage upgrades?

Board footer