FedUp does not yet ensure that only trusted software from Fedora is run on your system when you are doing upgrade over the network. Refer to Bugzilla: #877623 for more details. You can download the ISO release image and verify the authenticity independently before performing a upgrade with Fedup via media or ISO images methods to workaround this issue however a network upgrade is still the recommended option since it can handle updated packages better. Note that neither Anaconda or Preupgrade verified the authenticity of the source either and this is not a regression.
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, has no built-in 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.
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 Fedora 17 before continuing.
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
Files are downloaded to /var/tmp/fedora-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 sooner or later.
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?
First see Common F18 bugs#Upgrade_issues or Common F19 bugs whether the problem is not one of 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
Issues During Upgrade
If you hit issues after upgrade preparation and the initial reboot, search or file a bug against
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.
Will packages in third party repositories be upgraded?
Yes, if they are setup like regular yum repositories and do not hard core the repository path. The typical third party repositories like RPM Fusion work fine.
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.
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 F18 bugs#Upgrade_issues and read about the most common bugs found.
Preparing for the Upgrade
Make sure that you install the latest version of the fedup client on the system to be upgraded. At the time of this writing (2013-08-01), that is fedup-0.7.3-4.fc18
- 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 (
yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install fedupin the command line)
- Be sure to get the latest release, this may involve enabling updates-testing (
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.).
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 Fedora 19. If you use local media containing old Fedora 19 packages, you might end up with a mixture of Fedora 18 and Fedora 19 packages 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.
- Start the upgrade prep by executing following command
sudo fedup-cli --network 19
- Once the preparations have completed, check the
/var/log/fedup.logfile if any errors show up in the output fromfedup-cli
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-19.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.
- 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-19.isobut 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 runfedup-clicommand.
- For the sake of example, we will assume that the ISO exists at
- Start the upgrade prep by executing the following command
- sudo fedup-cli --iso /home/user/fedora-19.iso
- Once the preparations have completed, check the
/var/log/fedup.logfile if any errors show up in the output fromfedup-cli
Other Device
Optical drives and other mountable storage can also be used as a package source for upgrade preparations.
- Mount the source material
- For the sake of example, we will assume that this source is mounted at
/mnt/fedorabut you can mount it anywhere as long as you replace/mnt/fedorain the command below with the actual mounted location of the upgrade source.
- For the sake of example, we will assume that this source is mounted at
- Start the upgrade preparations by executing the following command
- sudo fedup-cli --device /mnt/fedora --debuglog=fedupdebug.log
- Once the preparations have completed, check the
fedupdebug.logfile if any errors show up in the output fromfedup-cli
Executing the Upgrade
This section still needs a reference to the 'esc kills plymouth' bug once a suitable summary has been written
- Reboot the system if
feduphas completed without error. - Once the system reboots, there should be a new entry in the GRUB menu titled
System Upgrade.- If you add
rd.upgrade.debugshellboot argument, you will get a login shell on VT2, allowing you to tinker with the system in case something goes wrong
- If you add
- Select the
System Upgradeoption from the GRUB menu- Remark: If the
System Upgradeitem 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:- grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
- grub2-install /dev/sda (replace /dev/sda by any other device you prefer to boot from)
- Remark: If the
- 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
- Once the upgrade process has completed, the system will reboot and an option to boot Fedora 41 will be on the grub menu
GRUB Updates
This part of the documentation is updating.
While updating GRUB on your upgraded system isn't strictly required, it is recommended for BIOS systems and very strongly recommended for UEFI systems due to the transition from grub-efi to grub2-efi
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
Migrating Grub Configuration
Unfortunately, most boot settings are not migrated to grub2 without manual intervention. To migrate these settings, you will need to look the existing grub configuration to migrate settings. Open the /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.conf and find the most recent boot entry. The version numbers don't need to exactly match the example, just find the most recent one.
title Fedora (3.6.11-1.fc17.x86_64)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-3.6.11-1.fc17.x86_64 rd.luks.uuid=luks-f664c3a9-e939-410e-8478-891f48b80f12
rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 KEYTABLE=us SYSFONT=True rd.lvm.lv=vg_test/lv_root
root=/dev/mapper/vg_test-lv_root ro rd.lvm.lv=vg_test/lv_swap
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rhgb quiet
initrd /initramfs-3.6.11-1.fc17.x86_64.img
We are not interested in all of the arguments following kernel, mostly arguments which start with rd. and a few other specific arguments. In the example listed above, we're interested in:
rd.luks.uuid=luks-f664c3a9-e939-410e-8478-891f48b80f12 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 rd.lvm.lv=vg_test/lv_root root=/dev/mapper/vg_test-lv_root ro rd.lvm.lv=vg_test/lv_swap rhgb quiet
To migrate the configuration, open /etc/default/grub with sudo or as root and paste the following template in:
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)" GRUB_DEFAULT=saved GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/system/theme.txt"
Need to write docs on how to figure out the vconsole lang and keymap args
Take the kernel args that we extracted before and insert them inside the quotes following GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX. In this example, it would look like the following. Note that formatting has been slightly altered for the wiki - there should be no newlines in the text following GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX.
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)" GRUB_DEFAULT=saved GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.luks.uuid=luks-f664c3a9-e939-410e-8478-891f48b80f12 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 rd.lvm.lv=vg_test/lv_root root=/dev/mapper/vg_test-lv_root ro rd.lvm.lv=vg_test/lv_swap rhgb quiet" GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/system/theme.txt"
Now that we've migrated the required grub settings, we can wrap up by generating a new grub configuration using these new settings and symlinking this new configuration to /etc/grub2-efi.cfg.
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg ln -s /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg /etc/grub2-efi.cfg
Updating the EFI boot entry
Once the
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, note that <boot number> is the boot number you found above:
efibootmgr -b <boot number> -B
Make sure you put quotes around '\EFI\fedora\grubx64.efi' or bash will interpret \E, \f and \g as control characters and your system will not boot properly
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>
Now your system should have a working grub2-efi bootloader and it should be loaded when you reboot.
Cleaning Up Post Upgrade
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 distribution-synchronization --disableplugin=presto
If you are using google-chrome from the google repository, you must re-install google-chrome due to a packing 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
- add details for secureboot/shim installation
- 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