FedUp

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Security Considerations
FedUp did not ensure that only trusted software from Fedora is run on your system when you are doing upgrade over the network prior to version 0.8. Refer to Bugzilla: #877623 for more details. If it is particularly important to you that you ensure the integrity of the upgrade packages, ensure you run your upgrade with FedUp 0.8 or higher.

What is FedUp?

FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the name of a new system for upgrading Fedora installs in Fedora 18 and later. It replaces all of the previously recommended upgrade methods (PreUpgrade and DVD) that were been used in previous Fedora releases. Anaconda, the Fedora installer, has no built-in upgrade functionality in Fedora 18 or later. It has been completely delegated to FedUp.

Currently, FedUp is capable of handling upgrades between all still-supported Fedora releases using a network repository or a DVD image as the package source. Upgrades from EOL Fedora releases may work, but are not supported. More methods for upgrade are currently planned and this page will be updated as those features are completed.

Fedora 16 and Older
The FedUp client does not build or run on anything older than Fedora 17. If you want to upgrade an older Fedora installation, please upgrade to a currently-supported Fedora release before continuing. If you are unable to contrive an upgrade from your EOL Fedora, you may have to reinstall.

What Does FedUp do?

The FedUp system consists of two parts - the client used to download packages and prepare for the upgrade and a pre-boot environment which does the actual upgrade using systemd and yum. More details are available in a blog post written by FedUp's primary author.

Files are downloaded to /var/tmp/system-upgrade (or the specified --cachedir) and will be automatically cleaned up after the upgrade process is finished.

The FedUp Client

The FedUp client runs on the system to be upgraded. It gathers the packages needed for upgrade in addition to downloading the required initramfs and kernel needed for the actual upgrade. At this time, only the fedup command-line interface is implemented but a GUI interface is expected...sometime.

The Upgrade

The actual upgrade takes place when the system has been rebooted after running the FedUp client. The filesystems are mounted during boot, the already downloaded packages are installed and some upgrade-related tasks are performed. During the upgrade process, a special plymouth theme is used which has a progress bar to indicate current upgrade progress.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my upgrade to Fedora 20 fail (immediately reboot to my old Fedora)?

Because we messed up! Sorry about that. FedUp 0.7, which was in the Fedora 18 and 19 stable repositories at the time of Fedora 20's release, cannot successfully upgrade to Fedora 20. FedUp 0.8, though, can do it just fine. You should use FedUp 0.8 to upgrade to Fedora 20. If you're upgrading from Fedora 18, you'll need to pass --nogpgcheck. See the Common Bugs page for all the details.

Can I upgrade a Fedora 16 or earlier system with FedUp?

No, this is not currently possible. The FedUp client does not currently build or run on Fedora 16 and you need to be running at least Fedora 17 in order to run the client. If you are upgrading from Fedora 16, use Preupgrade to upgrade to Fedora 17 first. Upgrades from Fedora 17 are no longer supported as it is now EOL, but it was the first release for which fedup was implemented and supported.

How do I report issues that I find with upgrades?

First see Common F19 bugs or Common F20 bugs to check if the problem is a very prominent issue we already know of. If it is not there, the component for reporting problems depends on the exact issue that you hit:

Issues with upgrade preparation

If you hit issues when using the FedUp client (fedup) before reboot, search or file a bug against fedup using the version you are upgrading from.

Issues During Upgrade

If you hit issues after upgrade preparation and the initial reboot, search or file a bug against fedup-dracut using the version you are upgrading to.

Issues After Upgrade

If you hit issues after upgrade with a specific package, file a bug against the package with which you are having issues.

How do I Debug Issues During Upgrade?

A troubleshooting and debug guide will be written at some point and linked to from here.

Does FedUp verify the software it runs or installs during upgrade?

Since version 0.8, it does so by default. The package signing keys for newer Fedora releases are now sent to older Fedora releases in order to allow FedUp to verify the integrity of the packages it downloads. You can disable this function with the --nogpgcheck parameter if you need to do so for any reason.

Will packages in third party repositories be upgraded?

Yes, if they are set up like regular yum repositories and do not hard code the repository path. Commonly-used third party repositories usually work fine, but if you attempt to upgrade prior to or soon after an official Fedora release, they may not have updated their repository paths yet, and FedUp may be unable to find their packages. This will usually not prevent the upgrade running successfully, though, and you can update the packages from the third-party repository later.

Can I use FedUp to upgrade to a pre-release (e.g. a beta)?

Yes. After a Fedora release has been branched, it should be possible to upgrade to it using FedUp. It should also work after the Alpha and Beta releases. Of course, this function is as subject to temporary breakage as any other aspect of a pre-release.

See this email to the Fedora devel mailing list for more details.

Where can I ask questions?

For now, the best place to ask questions is probably #fedora-qa^[?] on Freenode IRC or the test mailing list.

How Can I Upgrade My System with FedUp?

As alluded to above, there are three parts to upgrading with FedUp - preparation, execution and cleanup.

Before you start doing anything, be sure to have a look at Common F20 bugs#Upgrade_issues and read about the most common bugs found.

Preparing for the Upgrade

Latest fedup
Make sure that you install the latest version of the fedup client on the system to be upgraded. At the time of this writing (2013-12-17), that is fedup-0.8.0-3.

1. Do a full system update and reboot to ensure that any kernel changes are running
2. Install fedup
   • Usually, it is best to try first with the latest fedup available in the stable update repository for the release you are running. If you encounter problems with the upgrade, and a newer fedup is available in the updates-testing repository for your current release, you may wish to try with this newer version: yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install fedup at the command line)

There are three options for sourcing the packages needed for upgrade - using a network repository, a local ISO file or a local device (hard drive, optical disk etc).

Network upgrade is strongly recommended
It is strongly recommended to use the network upgrade instead of offline update modes (ISO, local device). Network upgrade will ensure you receive the latest packages from the target release. If you use local media containing older packages, you might end up with a mixture of packages from your former and target release, and the system might not work properly until you fully update it after reboot (if it boots at all).

Network

Using a network source is the easiest method of upgrading and will pull in updates while upgrading - eliminating the potential issue if your current system has a newer kernel version than the Fedora release to which you are upgrading.

1. Start the upgrade prep by executing following command
   • sudo fedup --network 20
2. Once the preparations have completed, check the /var/log/fedup.log file if any errors show up in the output from fedup

ISO File

In order to use an ISO file, it needs to exist locally on the filesystem of the system to be upgraded. The documentation is written as if that file is /home/user/fedora-20.iso but you will need to replace all instances of that path with the actual path of the ISO. Updates will be pulled in if you have network access on the machine to be upgraded.

1. Download the Fedora 41 ISO appropriate for the arch that you are running
   • For the sake of example, we will assume that the ISO exists at /home/user/fedora-20.iso but it can be anywhere in the filesystem as long as you alter the path below to reflect the actual location of the ISO. Make sure you have downloaded Fedora DVD ISO image otherwise you will get an error "The given ISO probably isn't an install DVD image" when run fedup-cli command.
2. Start the upgrade prep by executing the following command
   • sudo fedup-cli --iso /home/user/fedora-20.iso
3. Once the preparations have completed, check the /var/log/fedup.log file if any errors show up in the output from fedup-cli

Other Device

Optical drives and other mountable storage can also be used as a package source for upgrade preparations.

1. Mount the source material
   • For the sake of example, we will assume that this source is mounted at /mnt/fedora but you can mount it anywhere as long as you replace /mnt/fedora in the command below with the actual mounted location of the upgrade source.
2. Start the upgrade preparations by executing the following command
   • sudo fedup-cli --device /mnt/fedora --debuglog=fedupdebug.log
3. Once the preparations have completed, check the fedupdebug.log file if any errors show up in the output from fedup-cli

Executing the Upgrade

1. Reboot the system if fedup has completed without error.
2. Once the system reboots, there should be a new entry in the GRUB menu titled System Upgrade.
   • If you add rd.upgrade.debugshell boot argument, you will get a login shell on VT2, allowing you to tinker with the system in case something goes wrong
3. Select the System Upgrade option from the GRUB menu
   • Remark: If the System Upgrade item is not shown in the grublist at boot, it is most often caused by having a different grub, most often installed by another Linux distribution you may have in multiboot. To correct this quickly: reinstall grub:
     1. grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
     2. grub2-install /dev/sda (replace /dev/sda by any other device you prefer to boot from)
4. The system should boot into the upgrade process and a plymouth boot screen should be displayed
   • If you press 'esc', a more detailed log of progress will be desplayed but if you switch back to the graphical progress indicator, it will remain at 0% for the remainder of the upgrade but that does not mean the upgrade has stopped. See Need section reference here once it's written
5. Once the upgrade process has completed, the system will reboot and an option to boot Fedora 41 will be on the grub menu

Cleaning Up Post Upgrade

Pending
This part of the documentation is still being written

Relevant Bugs: Bug 888085; Bug 981135

It is worth rebuilding the RPM DB to prevent RPMDB checksum error when doing a distribution sync:

rpm --rebuilddb

There are a collection of post-upgrade things to do. Some of which are fixed by doing a distro sync:

yum distro-sync --setopt=deltarpm=0

If you are using google-chrome from the Google repository, you must re-install google-chrome due to a packaging bug on the Google side of things. Make sure to adjust the command to the build type you would like to install:

yum remove google-chrome-\* && yum install google-chrome-[beta,stable,unstable]

Docs TODO

• Write fedup troubleshooting and debug guide
• write commonbugs entries and link to them from this page
• add note about blob drivers if needed
• add notes about how to use other repos or link to discussion/instructions