Updating Packages

This section describes how to keep an existing Managarm build up to date after upstream repositories have merged changes.

Updating system packages

To keep up with updates of Managarm's kernel and drivers, it is usually enough to keep the packages managarm-kernel, managarm-system, mlibc and mlibc-headers up to date.

If you have local changes to these system packages, it is usually advisable to update the packages via git (see the following section). In other cases, xbstrap can be used to update these packages using the command:

xbstrap install -u --deps-of managarm-system --deps-of managarm-kernel --deps-of mlibc mlibc-headers

It is important to update mlibc-headers when mlibc modifies its public headers. If mlibc-headers is out of date, mlibc will still build fine but ports will not see any updates in C library headers.

Updating via git (or other version control tools)

xbstrap manages source repositories by using each package's upstream version control tool. In most cases, upstreams use git (although hg and svn are also supported by xbstrap). To update a package via git (or any other VCS), simply pull a new revision of the package and use xbstrap to rebuild it.

For example, pulling a new revision of the managarm repository and rebuilding the managarm-system and managarm-kernel packages can be achived via:

cd ~/managarm/src/managarm
git pull origin master
cd ~/managarm/build
xbstrap install --rebuild managarm-system managarm-kernel

Note: When updating packages through VCS, make sure to also keep their dependencies up to date. For the system packages mentioned above these dependencies include frigg, libasync, libsmarter, fafnir and lewis.

Updating ports

Updating ports via xbstrap works similarly as updating system packages. However, ports usually build from fixed versions (and not from branches). If local changes have been applied to such a fixed version (e.g., by patches), xbstrap refuses to automatically check out a different commit, as doing a git checkout (or similar) would risk loss of local commits and/or uncommitted changes. To override this behavior, pass --reset to discard local commits (or --hard-reset to discard uncommitted changes and local commits).

For example, to update bash, run

# Do a dry-run first. Make sure to verify that no local changes would be discarded.
xbstrap install -u -n bash
xbstrap install -u --reset bash

Note: It is safe to use --reset to remove patches that have been applied by xbstrap itself. However, care should be taken to not update repositories with important local modifications that you have applied yourself.

In case of git, local commits can usually be recovered after --reset by inspecting git reflog; uncommitted changes that are discarded by --hard-reset cannot easily be restored.