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MySQL 5.4 Feature Summary :: 2 Platform Availability and Installation/Upgrade Considerations
3 Scalability Improvements »
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2. Platform Availability and Installation/Upgrade Considerations

The initial release of MySQL 5.4 was 5.4.0 and binary distributions were available as 64-bit builds for Solaris 10-x86_64, Solaris10-SPARC, and Linux x86_64-glibc23. Subsequent releases include binary distributions for all standard platforms supported by MySQL, including Windows binaries with scalability improvements enabled.

If you use a source distribution, the BUILD/build_mccge.sh script can be used to configure and build MySQL 5.4. Run this script with the --help option to see the available options.

For installation instructions, see the MySQL 5.4 Reference Manual at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/.

If you upgrade to MySQL 5.4 from an existing MySQL 5.1 installation, an issue may occur due to InnoDB log file configuration changes. MySQL 5.4 increases the default value of innodb_log_files_in_group from 2 to 3. It also increases the default value of innodb_log_file_size from 5MB to 128MB and the minimum value of innodb_log_file_size from 1MB to 32MB.

For an upgrade, it is necessary to account for these changes. There are two ways to do so:

  1. Configure MySQL 5.4 to use your current configuration values. This can be done only if your current InnoDB log file size is at least as large as the new minimum size of 32MB. For example, if you use the previous default number of files (2), configured to a size of 64MB each, put these lines in your server's my.cnf file before starting the 5.4 server: 

    [mysqld]
innodb_log_files_in_group=2
innodb_log_file_size=64M

  2. Discard the old InnoDB log files and let MySQL 5.4 create new ones. This can be done regardless of your current configuration values, but it is necessary to shut down your current server cleanly so that no outstanding transaction information remains in the log. The procedure to use depends on the value of innodb_fast_shutdown:

    • If innodb_fast_shutdown is not set to 2: Stop your current MySQL server and make sure that it shuts down without errors (to ensure that there is no information for outstanding transactions in the log). Copy the old log files into a safe place in case something went wrong during the shutdown and you need them to recover the tablespace. Delete the old log files and edit my.cnf if necessary to specify the desired log file configuration. Then upgrade to MySQL 5.4 and start the new server. mysqld sees that no InnoDB log files exist at startup and creates new ones.

    • If innodb_fast_shutdown is set to 2: Set innodb_fast_shutdown to 1: 

      mysql> SET GLOBAL innodb_fast_shutdown = 1;

      Then follow the instructions in the previous item.

In MySQL 5.4, the innodb_file_io_threads system variable has been removed. If you upgrade to MySQL 5.4 from an existing MySQL 5.1 installation and explicitly set innodb_file_io_threads at server startup, you will need to change your configuration. innodb_file_io_threads system has been replaced with innodb_read_io_threads and innodb_write_io_threads, which can be used instead.