What is FedUp?
FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the name of a new system for upgrading Fedora installs in Fedora 18 and above releases. It replaces all of the currently recommended upgrade methods (PreUpgrade and DVD) that have been used in previous Fedora releases. Anaconda, the Fedora installer does have not any in-built upgrade functionality in Fedora 18 or above releases. It has been completely delegated to Fedup.
Currently, FedUp is capable of upgrading Fedora 17 installs to Fedora 18 using a networked repository, similar to how PreUpgrade worked. More methods for upgrade are currently planned and this page will be updated as those features are completed.
What Does FedUp do?
The FedUp system consistes of two parts - the client used to download packages and prepare for the upgrade and a pre-boot environment which does the actual upgrade using systemd and yum. More details are available in a blog post written by FedUp's primary author
The FedUp Client
The FedUp client runs on the system to be upgraded. It gathers the packages needed for upgrade in addition to downloading the required initramfs and kernel needed for the actual upgrade. At this time, only the fedup command-line interface is implemented but a GUI interface is expected before Fedora 18 is released.
The Upgrade
The actual upgrade takes place when the system has been rebooted after running the FedUp client. The filesystems are mounted during boot, the already downloaded packages are installed and some upgrade-related tasks are performed. During the upgrade process, a special plymouth theme is used which has a progress bar to indicate current upgrade progress.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I upgrade a Fedora 16 system with FedUp?
No, this is not currently possible. The FedUp client does not currently build or run on Fedora 16 and you need to be running at least Fedora 17 in order to run the client. If you are upgrading from Fedora 16, use Preupgrade to upgrade to Fedora 17 first.
How do I report issues that I find with upgrades?
The answer to this depends on the exact issue that you hit.
Issues with upgrade preparation
If you hit issues when using the FedUp client (
) before reboot, search for or file a bug against fedup using the version you are upgrading from.
fedup
Issues During Upgrade
If you hit issues after upgrade preparation and the initial reboot, search for or file a bug against
using the version you are upgrading to.
fedup-dracut
Issues After Upgrade
If you hit issues after upgrade with a specific package, file a bug against the package with which you are having issues.
How do I Debug Issues During Upgrade
A troubleshooting and debug guide will be written soon and linked to from here.
Does FedUp verify the software it runs or installs during upgrade?
This is a planned feature. See Bug 877623 for a status update.
Where can I ask Questions
For now, the best place to ask questions is probably #fedora-qa on Freenode IRC or the Fedora Test list.
How Can I Upgrade My System with FedUp?
As alluded to above, there are three parts to upgrading with FedUp - preparation, execution and cleanup.
Preparing for the Upgrade
- Do a full system update and reboot to ensure that any kernel changes are running
- Install
fedup
- Be sure to get the latest release, this may involve enabling updates-testing (put
--enablerepo=updates-testing
betweenyum
andinstall
on the command line)
- Be sure to get the latest release, this may involve enabling updates-testing (put
There are three options for sourcing the packages needed for upgrade - using a network repository, a local ISO file or a local device (hard drive, optical disk etc.).
Network
Using a network source is the easiest method of upgrading and will pull in updates while upgrading - eliminating the potential issue if 40 has a newer kernel version than 40.
- Start the upgrade prep by executing following command
sudo fedup --network 18 --debuglog fedupdebug.log --instrepo http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/qa/fedup/f18-RC4/<arch>/
- <arch> is the arch of the system that you are upgrading - either i386 or x86_64
- Once the preparations have completed, check the
fedupdebug.log
file if any errors show up in the output fromfedup-cli
ISO File
In order to use an ISO file, it needs to exist locally on the filesystem of the system to be upgraded. The documentation is written as if that file is /home/user/fedora-18.iso but you will need to replace all instances of that path with the actual path of the iso. Updates will be pulled in if you have network access on the machine to be upgraded.
- Download the 40 iso appropriate for the arch that you are running
- For the sake of example, we will assume that the iso exists at
/home/user/fedora-18.iso
but it can be anwhere in the filesystem as long as you alter the path below to reflect the actual location of the ISO.
- For the sake of example, we will assume that the iso exists at
- Start the upgrade prep by executing the following command
- sudo fedup --iso /home/user/fedora-18.iso --debuglog=fedupdebug.log
- Once the preparations have completed, check the
fedupdebug.log
file if any errors show up in the output fromfedup-cli
Other Device
Optical drives and other mountable storage can also be used as a package source for upgrade preparations.
- Mount the source material
- For the sake of example, we will assume that this source is mounted at
/mnt/fedora
but you can mount it anywhere as long as you replace/mnt/fedora
in the command below with the actual mounted location of the upgrade source.
- For the sake of example, we will assume that this source is mounted at
- Start the upgrade preparations by executing the following command
- sudo fedup --device /mnt/fedora --debuglog=fedupdebug.log
- Once the preparations have completed, check the
fedupdebug.log
file if any errors show up in the output fromfedup-cli
Executing the Upgrade
- Reboot the system if
fedup
has completed without error. - Once the system reboots, there should be a new entry in the GRUB menu titled
System Upgrade
.- Adding rd.upgrade.debugshell would be a decent idea
- Select the
System Upgrade
option from the GRUB menu - The system should boot into the upgrade process and a plymouth boot screen should be displayed
- If you press 'esc', a more detailed log of progress will be desplayed but if you switch back to the graphical progress indicator, it will remain at 0% for the remainder of the upgrade but that does not mean the upgrade has stopped. See Need section reference here once it's written
- Once the upgrade process has completed, the system will reboot and an option to boot Fedora 41 will be on the grub menu
GRUB Updates
Updating GRUB2 (BIOS systems)
- After upgrade, the grub2 you're booting from will still be the F17 version; upgrading must be done manually
- Follow the steps in this grub2 page to reinstall and update grub
Updating GRUB (UEFI systems)
Grub2 is not installed as part of the upgrade process, so you'll have to install it:
sudo yum install grub2-efi
Once the
package is installed, we need to add a new EFI boot entry. The easiest way to do this is to just modify the command used when Fedora was first installed. Note that you will not be using the exact same command when upgrading to grub2 as the location of some files has changed. The older reference command can be found in /var/log/anaconda/anaconda.program.log and should end with a command similar to:
grub2-efi
efibootmgr -c -w -L Fedora -d /dev/sdX -p Y -l \EFI\redhat\grub.efi
Find the current boot number for fedora using efibootmgr
:
efibootmgr -v
You are looking for a line similar to:
Boot0004* Fedora HD(1,800,34800,6733749f-b42a-4b8c-a0de-5a1d3505f8af)File(\EFI\redhat\grub.efi)
The boot number in this example is 0004.
Remove the old boot entry using the following command (<boot number>) is the boot number you found above:
efibootmgr -b <boot number> -B
Once you have the command that was used and the boot number of the old boot entry, you can change it to use the new grub2-efi installation:
sudo efibootmgr -c -w -L Fedora -d /dev/sdX -p Y -l '\EFI\fedora\grubx64.efi' -b <boot number>
In order to get a bootable UEFI system, you need to regenerate the grub configuration and symlink it to /etc/grub2-efi.cfg
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
Once the system reboots, you should be using grub2-efi instead of grub-efi
Cleaning Up Post Upgrade
Docs TODO
- Write fedup troubleshooting and debug guide
- add details for secureboot/shim installation
- write commonbugs entries and link to them from this page
- add note about blob drivers if needed
- add notes about how to use other repos or link to discussion/instructions