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 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 && 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