RHEL-7 to Rocky-8 update?

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

Is there a way to do an an upgrade (without re-kick) from RHEL-7 to Rocky 8?

2

You can use the elevate tool from Alma to potentially help you.

Note that our stance (at least from release engineering) is that upgrades or systems that were upgraded from a previous major release are not supported.

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3

Each major release is significantly different from previous. It is not trivial to replace something with mere “logical equivalent” and for some things there is no equivalent / no conversion.

While files are easier to replace, the configuration is less so. An automated tool should be able to read all custom configs and translate them for the new components. Some custom are more custom than others. (On worst case duct tape on duct tape to mimic ancient major version.)

Besides, upgrade is far from the only situation that can broke your system. Hardware breakage, user error, hack, etc are all out there to get you. You have to be able to install from scratch (and restore data from backups) anyway. (I have reinstalled several CentOS 7 setups this Fall to fix a judgement error I made in 2016. It is easy and quick, if one has a routine for it.)

You can of course try the ELevate, if you do have a contingency plan at hand.

Remember that EL8 is not EL7. You want to learn the new best practices and discard the EL7 routines.

4

One example is the default filesystem XFS. RHEL 8 ships a new version of XFS with new features and while you can read older XFS filesystems made in RHEL 7 this is not true the other way around! Of course you can insist and keep older XFS but you have to consider effects on performance, stability etc.

5

Thank you very much!

6

One thing I do is reserve two partitions for OS use separate from data and home partitions. This way I can install a new distro or distro version independent of the running OS. Then, even if you can’t boot back into the prior OS you can still mount that partition to recall configs that you’ve made. This may not be much of an issue with long term distro’s such as Rocky but on Fedora it is the only way I can maintain multiple machines consistently.

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