upgrade in-place process?

["Malcolm Herbert" <mjch%mjch.net@localhost>]

I have a VM with a provider that uses Xen under the hood.  Recently my VM suffered an outage which I believe may have been due to an upgrade of their platform to Xen 4.4.4 (or so dmesg says it is now).

My previous OS was (iirc) 6.1 and in order to get it to boot at all, the admin there has upgraded my kernel to 8.1_RC1 ...

I'm ok with this, but at some point I'll need to also upgrade all the userland binaries and I'm wondering the best method might be ... is there any documentation on how best to perform these steps?

Unfortunately although I do have the ability to start and stop the VM, I can't manipulate the VM config beyond asking their admin to boot my VM from a particular kernel image ... 

Should I ask that they boot from (say) the 8.1 netbsd-INSTALL_XEN3_DOMU.gz image and then go through the upgrade via that (I do have access to the console)?  Once that's done I can then ask that they boot from the regular 8.1 netbsd-XEN3_DOMU.gz

Regards,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Herbert
mjch%mjch.net@localhost