Blindingly Fast Upgrade

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In the OpenSolaris world, a Blindingly Fast Upgrade (BFU) is a term used to describe a way to upgrade a subset of a Solaris system's binaries using cpio archives instead of full software packages. But the BFU tool itself was developed very long ago in the early days of the Solaris Kernel around 1993. The original idea came from Roger Faulkner and Jeff Bonwick wrote a shell script to implement Faulkner's idea. As that shell script matured and continued to undergo revisions, it became the BFU tool as used in the OpenSolaris world today.

Originally BFU was internally known amongst developers as a Big F'ing Upgrade. But it was later refined to be "Blindingly Fast Upgrade" or "Bonwick/Faulkner Upgrade".

BFUs are not a recommended method for end users to upgrade their systems but the OpenSolaris developers and enthusiasts wanting the latest features on their machines use this as an extremely fast way to upgrade the bits on their machine instead of needing to compile the code.