X doesn't start when running a 14.2 kernel and 14.1 userland. So, there are complications. I didn't research anything yet. It might be i915/drm related as mentioned here. This needs an explicit warning. You will be hours without a graphical screen, during recompiling. The percentage of i915/Intel HD on-board graphics chipset users is too significant to ignore.
Updated Wifi and other Ethernet drivers.
Lesson learnt. For the newly-released version, I just assumed that the errata is empty and without checking the content. The errata and relnotes should be checked before system upgrading.
Same for me.
I think this what The Register’s mini-review found:
www.theregister.com
drm-515-kmod and gpu-firmware-intel-kmod-kabylake originally (not drm-kmod itself nor extra gpu-firmware), so it seems I'd only need to keep the drm-61-kmod part up-to-date from ports, while the gpu-firmware can remain a pkg and be unaffected by ABI changes?
A few years ago, when these compiled the kernel, or put into /boot/loader.conf they would always crash. Not much has been expected to have changed from this. By now, with older drivers now stabilized, those could be made to work from the kernel or into loader.conf.
Ah, so Warner thought the same earlier than my post here.
Possibly this is because staging area of loader (where loader loads kernel and specified kernel modules BEFORE STARTING KERNEL) was bumped to larger size.
It is always a good practice to recompile kernel bound modules after such upgrades. By compile I mean do it yourself (ports) or let someone else to do it for you (packages). Personally, I have always preferred to compile all by myself. Understand that some people may have a different preference.
This is a good process, it's also why a lot of us still boot to command line and then run startx. Again, just my preference.
For an even more trouble free upgrade you could disable everything you don't strictly need to boot the machine. All (extra) kernel modules and services (besides sshd(8) if you work remotely). For the bigger database servers for example I typically disable MySQL. I'm probably going to reboot a couple of times and I don't want the database starting/stopping interfering (or worse, breaking!). I'll enable everything again once I'm done with the OS upgrade.
Any link with an overview perhaps?
Yes, I agree but please note that we're talking about a laptop with a very simple configuration for desktop usage, with only two kernel modules that come from ports (i915kms and vboxdrv - this one simply refuses to load and doesn't do any harm).
