From Fedora Project Wiki

Fedora Upgrade

Summary

Upgrade Fedora to next version using yum upgrade.

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 19
  • Last updated: 2012-12-17
  • Percentage of completion: 40% - Well it is 100% devel done for upgrading from F17 to F18, I reserve those remaining 60%

What works

  • wiki page, which worked for several releases in past.
  • Script, which can upgrade from F17 to F18 and from F18 to rawhide
  • package is already in Fedora

What needs work

  • testing - a lot of testing

Detailed Description

Currently only supported upgrade method is using Anaconda. PreUpgrade is only wrapper, which just reduces maintanance window, but still require Anaconda. Which means quite long outage and do upgrade on-site (or using some KVM). But on-line upgrade is possible. E.g in Debian world it is even prefered method. In Fedora exist upgrade using yum as unofficial method for long time. A lot of people are using upgrade using yum for long time and the "problem ratio" is at least on pair with Anaconda upgrade. In fact most problems comes from improper packaging. E.g. maintainer forgot to obsolete, so during upgrade user get file conflict. Once these problems are reported and fixed the upgrade is without problem. If this method will be tested by FedoraQA, then I believe this upgrade method can be safely recommended to user.


Benefit to Fedora

Upgrade method which does not rely on Anaconda. And allow to provide upgrade method with nearly zero downtime.

Scope

Currently support only upgrade from N-1 version.

Test it on all supported platforms and probably on Secondary Arches as well.

Test it with different comps groups installed (Desktop, web server...)

How To Test

Download https://raw.github.com/xsuchy/fedora-upgrade/master/fedora-upgrade to machine with Fedora 17 and run it. You should end up with Fedora 18. Check if everything is correct.

User Experience

Upgrade without interruption of service. Only interrupted for aproximately 50 seconds needed for reboot.

Upgrade script is bash script, which is for power user like receipt. So if somethings breaks, admin can easily continue by investigating script - unlike anaconda or dracut, which is black box.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

There is bunch of upgrade methods: PreUpgrade (obsolete now), FedUp and Anaconda Installer. None of them conflicts with FedoraUpgrade. And if there will be problem with FedoraUpgrade we can easily rollback (or more precisely still use) to FedUp and Anaconda Installer.

Source

https://github.com/xsuchy/fedora-upgrade


Documentation

https://github.com/xsuchy/fedora-upgrade/blob/master/README.md

Release Notes

None yet.

Comments and Discussion