What is FedUp?
FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the name of a new system for upgrading Fedora installs in Fedora 18 and above releases. It replaces all of the currently recommended upgrade methods (PreUpgrade and DVD) that have been used in previous Fedora releases. Anaconda, the Fedora installer does have not any in-built upgrade functionality in Fedora 18 or above releases. It has been completely delegated to Fedup.
Currently, FedUp is capable of upgrading Fedora 17 installs to Fedora 18 using a networked repository, similar to how PreUpgrade worked. More methods for upgrade are currently planned and this page will be updated as those features are completed.
What Does FedUp do?
The FedUp system consistes 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
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 before Fedora 18 is released.
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
Can I upgrade a Fedora 16 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.
How do I report issues that I find with upgrades?
The answer to this 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 for 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 for 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 soon and linked to from here.
Does FedUp verify the software it runs or installs during upgrade?
This is a planned feature. See Bug 877623 for a status update.
Where can I ask Questions
For now, the best place to ask questions is probably #fedora-qa on Freenode IRC or the Fedora Test 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.
Preparing for the Upgrade
- Do a full system update and reboot to ensure that any kernel changes are running
- Install
fedup
- Be sure to get the latest release, this may involve enabling updates-testing (put
--enablerepo=updates-testing
betweenyum
andinstall
on the command line)
- Be sure to get the latest release, this may involve enabling updates-testing (put
- Find the URL of the branched TC or RC under test. For Fedora 18 beta, this URL would be http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/18-Beta/Fedora/<arch>/os. You can also substitute the root of a local mirror instead of using the main download site.
- If you're upgrading before Fedora 18 is actually released - please read the above warning about the URL for --instrepo. Yes, you will need to use it until GA. These instructions will be changed by the time that all the backend mirroring is updated.
- <arch> is the name of the arch running on the install to be upgraded (i386, x86_64 ...)
- Start the upgrade prep by executing following command
sudo fedup --network 18 --debuglog fedupdebug.log --instrepo <URL>
- <URL> is the location found in the previous step
- Check the
fedupdebug.log
file if any errors show up in the output fromfedup
Executing the Upgrade
- Reboot the system if
fedup
has completed without error. - Once the system reboots, there should be a new entry in the GRUB menu titled
System Upgrade
. - Select the
System Upgrade
option from the GRUB menu- If you want to be able to see progress during the upgrade, append
plymouth.splash=fedup
to the end of the kernel parameters (line starting withlinux
)
- If you want to be able to see progress during the upgrade, append
- The system should boot into the upgrade process and a plymouth boot screen should be displayed
- Do not press any key, otherwise the progress screen will be killed and you will have no information about the process
- Once the upgrade process has completed, the system will reboot and an option to boot Fedora 42 will be on the grub menu
GRUB Updates
Updating GRUB2 (BIOS systems)
- After upgrade, the grub2 you're booting from will still be the F17 version; upgrading must be done manually
- Follow the steps in this grub2 page to reinstall and update grub
Updating GRUB (UEFI systems)
Grub2 is not installed as part of the upgrade process, so you'll have to install it:
sudo yum install grub2-efi
Once the grub2-efi
package is installed, we need to add a new EFI boot entry. The easiest way to do this is to just modify the command used when Fedora was first installed. This command can be found in /var/log/anaconda/anaconda.program.log and should end with a command similar to:
efibootmgr -c -w -L Fedora -d /dev/sdX -p Y -l \EFI\redhat\grub.efi
Find the current boot number for fedora using efibootmgr
:
efibootmgr -v
You are looking for a line similar to:
Boot0004* Fedora HD(1,800,34800,6733749f-b42a-4b8c-a0de-5a1d3505f8af)File(\EFI\redhat\grub.efi)
The boot number in this example is 0004.
Remove the old boot entry using the following command (<boot number>) is the boot number you found above:
efibootmgr -b <boot number> -B
Once you have the command that was used and the boot number of the old boot entry, you can change it to use the new grub2-efi installation:
sudo efibootmgr -c -w -L Fedora -d /dev/sdX -p Y -l '\EFI\fedora\grubx64.efi' -b <boot number>
In order to get a bootable UEFI system, you need to regenerate the grub configuration and symlink it to /etc/grub2-efi.cfg
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
Once the system reboots, you should be using grub2-efi instead of grub-efi
Cleaning Up Post Upgrade
Some of the stuff from this post upgrade cleanup guide might be wise