OpenBSD: -stable (original) (raw)
What is the -stable Branch?
The -stable branch is one of OpenBSD's threeflavors. It consists of the release and errata patches. More precisely:
- Errata entries are made for bugs which affect many people.
- Other patches may be merged into -stable if they affect a few people in drastic ways.
- New or changed functionality, hardware support or APIs will not be merged.
This page describes how to follow the -stable branch via CVS and building from source. If you're running a release on amd64, i386, or arm64, you can also use the syspatch(8) utility to upgrade any files in need of security or reliability fixes with binary updates. More information can be found here.
Getting -stable Source Code
To obtain the -stable tree for a particular release of OpenBSD, you canupdate on top of a pre-existing source tree or you can check out a fresh source tree from an AnonCVS server.
Do not attempt to go from one release to another via source. Instead, please follow the upgrade guide for the release before compiling -stable.
Building OpenBSD -stable
Details on building OpenBSD from source are provided in steps 2 and 3 of therelease(8) manual. There is also an FAQ on building the system. If you have a number of machines to keep on the -stable branch, you may wish to make a release.
Rebuild the kernel and reboot
Replace GENERIC.MP with GENERIC for single-core processor systems.
cd /sys/arch/$(machine)/compile/GENERIC.MP
make obj
make config
make && make install
reboot
If your system has trouble booting the new kernel, you can easily go back and reboot from the old kernel, now called obsd.