Patch Branches

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Table Of Contents

• What is the patch branch?
• Getting the patch branch
• Building from the patch branch

What is the patch branch?

Starting with 2.7, OpenBSD provides a source tree that contains important patches and fixes (i.e. those from the errata plus others which are obvious and simple, but do not deserve an errata entry) and makes it available via CVS in addition to the current source. Thus, users can choose three options :

• Stick with our latest release and apply the patches by hand.
• Use the patch branch which has the most important patches applied.
• Use current source for all of the latest features.

As a general principle, all Errata entries will be merged into the patch branch within 48 hours of when an errata is published. Other post release patches may be merged in as well, subject to a number of conditions:

• The patches must be simple, short, and obviously 100% correct.
• Errata entries are made for bugs which affect many people. Other patches may be merged into the patch branch if they affect a few people in drastic ways.
• Please do not ask for large subsystems or patches to be merged. Maintaining the patch tree takes a lot of effort which could be better spent on making our next release better.
• As an exception to the above rules, OpenSSH release versions will be merged into the patch branch.

Getting a stable branch

To obtain the patch branch for a particular release of OpenBSD, you can update on top of a pre-existing source tree (from FTP or the CD) or you can grab the source tree freshly from an AnonCVS server. Instructions for getting the patch branch and staying up to date are described in the Getting Started section of the AnonCVS documentation. Note that patch branches do not help to upgrade from one release of OpenBSD to another, e.g. to go from 3.7 to 3.8. They only provide a means for staying up to date with the patches within a given release. If you are trying to go from one release to another via source, please visit the upgrade guide. Also, you cannot go backwards, from -current back to -stable, because of library versioning problems.

Building from an OpenBSD patch branch

• Rebuild the kernel
• Reboot with the new kernel
• Rebuild the binaries

Rebuilding the kernel

To rebuild the default kernel from stable:

# cd /usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf
# /usr/sbin/config GENERIC
# cd /usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
# make clean && make depend && make

Replace i386 with your architecture, e.g. sparc, alpha, etc.

Rebooting with the new kernel

To reboot with the newly compiled kernel:

# cd /usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
# cp /bsd /bsd.old          (Save an old copy of your kernel)
# cp bsd /bsd               (Copy the new kernel into place)
# reboot

As above, substitute your architecture for i386. If your system has trouble booting the new kernel, you can easily go back and reboot from the old kernel, now called bsd.old.

Rebuilding the binaries

To rebuild the system binaries:

# cd /usr/src
# rm -r /usr/obj/*
# make obj && make build

This will take awhile...