What is the -stable branch?
The -stable branch is one of OpenBSD's three
flavors.
It consists of the release and errata patches.
More precisely:
- Errata entries are made for bugs which affect many people.
- Other patches may be merged into -stable if they affect a few
people in drastic ways.
- New or changed functionality, hardware support or APIs will not be
merged.
If you're running the -release branch of OpenBSD on amd64 or i386, you can
simply use the syspatch(8) utility
to upgrade any files in need of
security or reliability fixes.
This page describes how to follow the -stable branch via CVS and building
from source.
Getting -stable source code
To obtain the -stable tree for OpenBSD 6.1, it is recommended that you
check out a fresh source tree from an
AnonCVS server.
If you need to update on top of a
pre-existing source tree, you need to do
some cleanup first.
Do not attempt to go from one release to another via source.
Instead, please follow the upgrade guide for
the release before compiling -stable.
Building OpenBSD -stable
Details on building OpenBSD from source are provided in steps 2 and 3 of the
release(8) manual.
There is also an FAQ on building the system.
If you have a number of machines to keep on the -stable branch, you may
wish to make a release.
Rebuild the kernel and reboot
Replace GENERIC with GENERIC.MP for multiprocessor systems.
# cd /sys/arch/$(machine)/conf
# config GENERIC
# cd /sys/arch/$(machine)/compile/GENERIC
# make clean && make obj && make && make install
# reboot
If your system has trouble booting the new kernel, you can easily go back
and reboot from the old kernel, now called obsd.
Rebuilding the userland
# rm -rf /usr/obj/*
# cd /usr/src
# make obj && make build