dnf-system-upgrade

dnf system-upgrade subcommand [options]

dnf system-upgrade is a DNF plugin used to perform major version upgrades of Fedora and other RPM-based distributions in an offline manner. Instead of upgrading the system while it runs, the plugin downloads every required package and then reboots into a dedicated systemd target where the transaction is applied with no user processes active.The workflow is three stages: download stages packages and verifies dependencies; reboot restarts the machine into the offline upgrade environment; on completion the system reboots again into the new release. clean discards the staged transaction if the upgrade is aborted.The plugin also exposes offline-upgrade and offline-distrosync subcommands which apply the same offline mechanism to ordinary updates and distro-syncs rather than to a release change.

download

Download all packages needed for the upgrade and stage them for the next boot.

Trigger a reboot into the offline upgrade environment that performs the transaction.

Remove cached packages and the saved transaction state.

Print the state of the current pending upgrade (no upgrade, download complete, etc).

List previous upgrade attempts; with --number N show journal output for that boot (commonly -1 for the last).

Set the Fedora release version to upgrade to (e.g. 40, 41).

Permit DNF to remove packages whose dependencies cannot be satisfied on the new release.

Try to use the best available package versions, failing if not possible.

Skip GPG signature verification (not recommended).

The reboot phase rewrites the live root filesystem; the machine must be on stable power and not interrupted, or the system may be left unbootable. Third-party repositories often lag a release behind, so --allowerasing is frequently required. The plugin only supports going forward; downgrades between releases are not safe. Skipping a release (e.g. 39 to 41) is officially unsupported, even when it appears to work.

The plugin originated as fedup in 2012 for Fedora 18, providing the first supported in-place upgrade path. It was rewritten as dnf-plugin-system-upgrade in 2015 for Fedora 23 to integrate with DNF, and folded into dnf-plugins-extras. In 2024 the plugin became a first-class component of dnf5 shipping with Fedora 41.

dnf(8), dnf5(8), systemctl(1), rpm(8)