[OpenIndiana-discuss] updates and reboots

[Toomas Soome]

> On 8. Jan 2024, at 09:56, Goetz T. Fischer <g.fischer at r-a-c.de> wrote:
> 
> of course but that raises the question why new libs would require a reboot. the worst that could happen 
> is that programs which depend on that lib would crash if they're restarted. but if they're also updated, 
> then the next time they're restarted or just started it'll be fine.
> let's say there's a new openssl so i simply copy the new one over the old one, restart ssh and i'm good.
> 
> similarly i can for example update rhel for months without a reboot and that works. and i don't mean 
> live kernel patching. basically i only have to reboot for kernel stuff. but for everything else i just 
> don't see a reason for all these reboots.

reboot is needed to verify your setup is still working as supposed after an update. You can have different kind of potential issues; if file is overwritten, then your currently running app will most likely crash, if the file is replaced, then running apps will continue to use old content till the apps are restarted and you can have mixture of old and new setup, which can give interesting results sometimes (you think your system has security patch installed, but actually old code is running and you are still vulnerable for example).

Of course, the context can be different, getting your vi or gnu tar updated most likely will not affect your system, but there are different scenarios.

Having BE concept actually does imply that you get used to have those BE’s created, so that you can actually rely on actually having the option to roll back in case of failure from update, or recovery from other kind of corruption. And yes, the cost of having those BE’s is needing to actually create those BE’s and leave old one functional.

I have seen plenty of cases where people have done those “small changes” on live systems over long period of time and ending up unbootable or broken systems once they actually reboot the system. Therefore I really encourage to have habit to reboot the system, to make sure that everything is still behaving as you do expect to.

rgds,
toomas

> 
> On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 08:10:51 +0100, Marcel Telka wrote:
>> many newly built packages will require something from new
>> illumos-gate (typically system/library[*])
> 
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