2015-10-19
Installing and pinning specific versions of OmniOS packages
Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you want to install some additional OmniOS systems with their kernels pinned to a specific version, one that you know works because it's what you're already running on your current OmniOS machine (in fact, perhaps you are having problems with a more recent kernel on your test machine). In order to do this, you're going to need to do three things: you need to find out what versions of what packages to pin, then you need to actually install those specific versions of the packages, and finally you need to keep them from changing.
Once you have the full FMRIs of the packages you want to have a
specific version of when you install a new system, there are two
cases: install time upgrades and downgrades. The simplest approach
is upgrades; you start from an old OmniOS installer image for your
OmniOS version, then upgrade the packages you need to only their
specific version instead of all the way to the latest one. This is
done by giving 'pkg update' the full package FMRIs on the command
line; if you have a file called pkg-versions, this is:
pkg update $(cat pkg-versions)
But wait, as they say, there is a complication (at least for the
kernel). Kernel upgrades require a new boot environment (and are
done in that new BE) and if you're installing from an older image,
you have other packages to upgrade too and some of them may also
require a new boot environment. So what you really want to do is
install both your specific versions and 'the latest updates to other
packages' at the same time. This is done by also giving 'pkg
update' an explicit "*" argument:
pkg update $(cat pkg-versions) "*"
This lets you do the whole process in a single new BE and a single reboot.
If you're installing from the very latest OmniOS installer image
for your OmniOS version, you actually need to downgrade your packages.
According to the documentation this is also done with 'pkg update
$(cat pkg-versions)', but I haven't tested it so I don't know if it
works right. My moral is save your old OmniOS installer images,
partly because I trust 'upgrade only to a specific version' more
than 'start with a more recent version and downgrade'
(It's possible that old installer images are still available somewhere, but I don't know where to find them. Old package versions are kept around in at least the r151014 repo and this will hopefully continue to be the case.)
Once you've actually installed your versions of the specific packages,
you need to freeze them against further upgrades. This is done with the
straightforward 'pkg freeze <FMRI> [...]':
pkg freeze -c "known to work kernel" $(cat pkg-versions)
However, once again boot environments get in the way. Installing
our kernel packages created a new boot environment, and you have
to freeze packages in the new BE, not the current one. So the easy
way to go is to reboot into the new BE before you run the 'pkg
freeze'.
(It's possible that you could manually mount the new BE with 'beadm
mount' and then point 'pkg freeze' at it with pkg's -R
argument, per here. However I haven't
tested it and I honestly think it's probably simpler to reboot into
the new BE first under most circumstances.)
PS: It's unfortunate that 'pkg freeze' won't freeze specific
versions that are later than what you have installed. Otherwise the
easy approach would be to freeze first, run a general 'pkg upgrade'
(which should upgrade your packages to their frozen versions and
everything else to the latest versions), and then reboot into your
new BE. But that would probably make freezing more complex in the
pkg code, so I can sort of see why it isn't allowed.