What’s redhat-upgrade-tool?

by Davoud Teimouri · Published 07/06/2019 · Updated 02/09/2024

The redhat-upgrade-tool provides a way to upgrade Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The redhat-upgrade-tool command is a program to collect the information for upgrade and prepare the environment. It includes downloading kernel, and initial ram image, and packages.

Some free space on the storage is needed to store those files. As a source for installation repository, there are three options: an ISO file, a device file, or a repository on the network. One of them must be specified in the command option. Also, it creates an grub entry as default entry for upgrade with the downloaded kernel and initial ram image, then it’s used for the next boot to start the upgrade tasks.

On This Post:

Command Options of “redhat-upgrade-tool”

Here is the command options of “redhat-upgrade-tool”:

To specify SOURCE (including RHEL7 installation image)
- From repository on network
  - –network 7.0
    - Specify the version after upgrade
  - –instrepo URL
    - Main repository for RHEL7
    - NOTE: –instrepo= is the main repository to get .treeinfo, kernel, and initial ram image. When –network is used, –instrepo is must. Other repositories are used just for additional packages.
  - –enablerepo repositoryid
    - for existing repo in yum configuration
  - –disablerepo repositoryid
    - for existing repo in yum configuration
    - NOTE: You may want to specify –disablerepo=* option definitely, because any repositories in current (RHEL6) system is not needed for upgrade.
  - –addrepo <repoid>=URL
    - for undefined repo
    - Example: –addrepo myrepo=http://example.com/repo
  - Example: # redhat-upgrade-tool –network 7.0 –instrepo http://example.com/rhel70 –disablerepo=*
- From dvd device or mount point
  - –device <device file> or –device <mount point>
  - Example: # redhat-upgrade-tool –device /dev/sr0
  - Example: # redhat-upgrade-tool –device /mnt/dvd
- From iso file
  - –iso <iso file>
    Example: # redhat-upgrade-tool –iso /opt/rhel70.iso
To clean up the configuration created for upgrade
- — clean
For Debugging
- –verbose, -v
  - set log level with INFO
- –debug, -d
  - set log level with DEBUG
- –force
  - Skip preupgrade-assistant
  - Skip distribution check.
    - NOTE: The distribution check is confirming that the current distribution is “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” and the upgrade repository is for “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”. The former is from /etc/redhat-release, the latter is from .treeinfo in the repository.
  - –skipkernel
    - Skip downloading vmlinuz and upgrade.img
  - –skippkgs
    - Skip downloading packages
  - –skipbootloader
    - Skip modifying upgrade.img and adding a grub entry
NOTE: Refer to “man redhat-upgrade-tool” as well