First an upgrade of a desktop with 6Gb of memory from fc19 to fc20 worked with no problems in around 3hrs, and came up cleanly (there is still the outstanding issue with encrypted disks if you don’t reply to the boot password prompt in time but there have been issues with that for years, not fixed by fc20 alas).
The probs I had were upgrading my dev server form fc18 to fc19. It only has 756Mb of memory and that was the main problem.
I thought it had hung the first time I tried the upgrade so cancelled it… oops, machine was unusable (now I remember, never cancel yum)… over 3000 duplicate packages and rpm, yum and package-cleanup refused to touch them. Had to do a bare metal restore from my last backup and start all over again.
After yum had been running for almost two days on the second attempt, I had a closer look. Investigation showed yum was using a lot of paging space, the damn thing had swapped out even though top showed it was only using a little over 20% of real memory.
A solution. Not my solution, I found it at http://www.unixmen.com/how-to-clear-memory-cache-on-linux-servers/ .
A brief explaination of what it does is in answer three on http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/58553/how-to-clear-memory-cache-in-linux with a link to more detailed info.
But it works on fc18 anyway. It cleared the memory allocated to buffers. On a server with 756Mb of real memory, almost all in use, top tells me the commands gave me 400Mb of real memory back for yum to carry on with.
And the commands, as root enter
sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
The yum progress bar started moving again… but very slowly. Added the commands to cron to run each hour, checked the next morning and yum had paused again… oh yeah, when memory started getting low I stopped all non-essential services like cron, bother. Started cron.. and eventually the upgrade did complete, in a little under four days. Rebooted, it came up ok on fc20.
package-cleanup –orphans shows a lot of orphaned packages, many of them tagged fc20 so a lot of the orphaned packages were installed by the upgrade, so they shouldn’t be orphans.
Anyway “yum check”, “package-cleaup –dupes” and “package-cleanup –problems” say all is well.
Will take another backup then work on clearing out the orphans, the only orphaned packages I expect to see are printer driver packages I installed myself, not packages yum pulled down. Might try yums autoremove option to see what happens, never tried it, definately need a backup first.
Anyway, one desktop and one dev server upgraded.
Laptop still to go, then to build a new kickstart image for this webserver …to test in a vm before I format the disks hosting these web pages with the new kickstart :-).
