Re: Upgrading NetBSD base system

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost> writes:

> I have Beaglebone Black running NetBSD-7.0 which I would like to
> upgrade to NetBSD-8. Normally on x86 I would extract binary sets +
> kernel and run etcupdate, but on ARM I'm not sure what happens to the
> files under /boot folder. Do these need to be upgraded as well and if
> so, how?

I have not used a BB, but indeed on RPI, there are three things going on
as you say:

  userland (sets not kernel)
  kernel (in /boot)
  other stuff in /boot

I asked about this a while ago.  On x86, in addition to userland and
kernel, there is
  mbrboot_foo in block 0
  bootxx_foo in blocks 2-15
 /boot
However, these usually continue to work, and they are just boot, not
firmware.

For RPI, the other-than-kernel stuff in boot:

  total 56696
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     1494 Oct 26  2017 LICENCE.broadcom
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    17932 Oct 26  2017 bootcode.bin
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      105 Nov  9 09:38 cmdline.txt
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     6624 Oct 26  2017 fixup.dat
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     2533 Oct 26  2017 fixup_cd.dat
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  2823716 Oct 26  2017 start.elf
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   634948 Oct 26  2017 start_cd.elf

is obviously someplace in our source tree, but does not appear to be
installed under /usr/mdec/RPI or some such, where one could a) find it
in an installed userland and b) use it to update /boot.  There are some
things in /usr/mdec.  An issue is that evbarm as a port covers a large
amount of hardware and /usr/mdec, if it had all files for all types,
could become larger than most would like.

Overall, my advice is to do a release build of netbsd-8, and then use
whatever image is provided to find the current version of /boot/foo and
use that to update /boot, along with the kernel, and see if that boots,
and if so use the userland sets to update userland.