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A comment on FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1. Parent comment

Re:FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 by Mister_Snuggles on Monday September 14, 2020 @12:38PM (#24472164)
I believe that's the same in FreeBSD as well. I also think it's a solved problem in the Linux world - OpenSuse Tumbleweed sometimes rebuilds every package because they've changed libc. Apart from watching 2000+ packages get updated, there's really no impact when this happens.

To solve this, the updater could create a new boot environment[0], install everything in that boot environment using as many passes as required, then reboot into that environment. OpenSuse already does a similar thing[1], though I don't know how well it works.

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?beadm

[1] https://news.opensuse.org/2018/05/15/transactional-updates-i...

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Re:FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 by asveikau on Monday September 14, 2020 @12:41PM (#24472198)
The situation on linux is actually different because the kernel and glibc are maintained separately and the syscall ABI is treated as a boundary between components.

Any time a new syscall is wrapped the userland maintainers need to account for what happens when run on an old kernel and typically have some fallback logic.

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