This will be my first major version upgrade with OpenWRT. I have an x86/64 computer as my router with ext4 file system.
I'm wondering, when I download the new 24.10 image, do I need to "build" an image that has all of my existing installed packages like OpenVPN, pbr, acme, etc? Or is the upgrade smart enough to either keep those packages or upgrade them?
And if I have to build a custom image, is there an easy way to determine which extra packages I need from the existing version instead of just opkg --list-installed?
I just went through this upgrade process and am sharing my experience in case any of this information helps anyone.
NOTE: Always create a backup before trying to upgrade.
I was running the 23.05.5 x86/64 EFI Squashfs image on my system because that is what I decided to go with on that build at the onset. It was built using the 23.05.5 Image Builder along with custom partition sizing for the following in the .config of the builder (NOTE: These are the defaults and mine are different):
I created a custom 24.10 image using the Image Builder along with all the packages I had installed on the running 23.05.5 router and made sure to set the above values on the 24.10.0 builder to match what I had in the 23.05.5 builder. If not, the new image would completely overwrite my existing disk layout (which is a custom layout). I then used the Flash new firmware image option in Luci to upload the new 24.10 Squashfs image and proceeded with the upgrade.
Important items to note when flashing the upgrade image:
If you have made any changes to /boot/grub/grub.conf, they will be lost when the image is flashed. Make sure to backup this file so that you can reference it to make any applicable changes after the upgrade.
If you have any custom services that you have created using custom init scripts, the services will default to disabled after flashing the new image. You will need to set these back to enabled and start these services after the upgrade.
If you are running banip, the /etc/banip/banip.custom.feeds file used in 23.05 seems to be incompatible with the banip version available in 24.10 and caused numerous issues for me. I had to remove my previous feeds file and create a new one.
Here's what I used to get a list of packages installed on the system with 23.05 to feed into the 24.10 builder:
I had elected to install all possible kmods in 23.05, but there were a handful of kmods available in 23.05 no longer available in 24.10. Therefore, you will need to figure out what those are if applicable to your situation when the Image Builder errors out stating that it cannot install those packages.
Beyond the relatively minor gotchas noted above, the upgrade went relatively well for my setup.
Thanks for the info! I eventually got around to performing the upgrade. Mine did not go as smoothly. My existing 23.05 was installed on a 256GB nvme drive so I bought another and copied the whole drive onto the new one, just so I'd have a backup to fall back to in case things went south. And they did. I tried the attended upgrade since it sort of indicated that it would upgrade all of the currently installed packages. I wasn't sure what all I had installed after the initial install. If I recall, the attended upgrade pretty much failed and I had to restore the backed up image from the new nvme drive. After that, I just wrote the 24.10 image to the new drive and tried to copy most of the configurations manually to the new drive before installing it into the actual computer. Things went mostly well after that. It took me a while to get the OpenVPN server working again but I did. The only thing left is that the ddns scripts don't seem to be working correctly after a reboot. I usually have to restart them manually anytime the IP address changes. At least I'm at 24.10 now. I'm hoping the upgrade and the new kernel will fix some docker issues I was having on 23.05.