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.
Getting -stable source code
To obtain the -stable tree for a particular release of OpenBSD, you can
update on top of a pre-existing source tree
or you can check out a fresh source tree from
an AnonCVS server.
Do not attempt to go from one release to another via source.
Instead, please read the upgrade guide for the
release in question.
Building OpenBSD -stable
Details on building OpenBSD from source are provided in steps 2 and 3 of the
release(8) manual.
Before you start, you may also want to read the FAQ on
building the system from source.
If you have a number of machines to keep on the -stable branch, you may
wish to make a release by creating
file sets that can be quickly and
easily installed on any machine of the same platform.
The release(8) man page contains
all the relevant information.
Rebuild the kernel and reboot
Replace GENERIC with GENERIC.MP for multiprocessor systems.
# cd /usr/src/sys/arch/$(uname -m)/conf
# config GENERIC
# cd /usr/src/sys/arch/$(uname -m)/compile/GENERIC
# make clean && 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
To rebuild the base system binaries:
# rm -rf /usr/obj/*
# cd /usr/src
# make obj
# cd /usr/src/etc && env DESTDIR=/ make distrib-dirs
# cd /usr/src
# make build