The AutoYaST profile for the automated upgrade uses the same file format as the AutoYaST installation. For more information about AutoYaST, see Chapter 21, Automated Installation and AutoYaST.

However, there are some parts of the system (for example, partitioning) that do not make sense to be configured during the upgrade. On the other hand, it is useful to set upgrade-specific options by means of the AutoYaST profile.

<upgrade>
  <only_installed_packages
    config:type="boolean">false</only_installed_packages>
  <stop_on_solver_conflict
    config:type="boolean">true</stop_on_solver_conflict>
</upgrade>

<software>
  <packages config:type="list">
    <package>autoyast2-installation</package>
    <package>apparmor-profile-editor</package>
  </packages>
  <patterns config:type="list">
    <pattern>base</pattern>
  </patterns>
  <remove-packages config:type="list"/>
  <remove-patterns config:type="list"/>
</software>

<backup>
  <sysconfig config:type="boolean">true</sysconfig>
  <modified config:type="boolean">true</modified>
  <remove_old config:type="boolean">false</remove_old>
</backup>

To start the automated upgrade, boot the installation media and pass the AutoYaST profile to it. There are two ways to pass the profile to the system:

The latter approach allows you to have a single installation kernel command line for even different machines—just copy the appropriate profile into its file system.

As long as you have only one SUSE Linux Enterprise system installed on your machine, there are no package conflicts and you did not set the profile to stop on the upgrade proposal, the complete process will be non-interactive. In case you enter the upgrade proposal, you can modify its settings for the upgrade.

After the upgrade finishes, YaST writes the /root/autoupg-updated.xml file, which contains the profile with applied software selection changes done in the proposal. This is especially useful in case of mass upgrades of machines with the same package selection. This way, conflict resolutions from one machine can easily be applied on other machines, which consequently will get these conflicts resolved automatically and the upgrade itself will be non-interactive.

If there are more SUSE Linux Enterprise systems installed on the machine, you will always be asked, which one to upgrade—there is no way to select it in advance.

An alternate way to boot the system is to create an additional section in the GRUB 2 menu (and similar for other boot loaders and other architectures), which starts the installation. The following example assumes that there is a separate /boot partition, which is referred in GRUB 2 as (hd0,0):

title Upgrade
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /upgrade/linux
    install=inst_source_url autoupgrade=1
    autoyast=autoyast_profile_url vga=0x314
    initrd /upgrade/initrd
  

The above example assumes that the installation kernel and the installation initrd are located in the /boot/upgrade directory.

On System z, you must add the parameters to the PARM file—proceed the same way as you do when performing an AutoYaST-driven installation.

The automated upgrade by default does not perform configuration changes during the second stage of the upgrade. The only exception is network configuration, which needs to be set to be preserved in the AutoYaST upgrade profile.

If configuration adjustment of some system areas is needed after the upgrade (for example, configuring a new service), add the relevant sections to the AutoYaST profile for the upgrade and the configuration of the selected system areas will be saved during the upgrade.

Warning: AutoYaST Supplied Configuration Replaces Existing Configuration

Be warned that existing configuration of that system area will be replaced and thus destroyed by the AutoYaST configuration.

Normally, the only configuration adjustment, which should be present in the AutoYaST profile, is the registration of the system with Subscription Management Tool (SMT) or SUSE Customer Center (SCC). If this is missing, the system will not get the update repository and updates will not be possible—unless configured later again.