[OpenIndiana-discuss] updates and reboots

[Marcel Telka]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2024 at 08:56:30AM +0100, Goetz T. Fischer wrote:
> of course but that raises the question why new libs would require a reboot. the worst that could happen 

New libs does not require reboot on their own.  The problem is with
system/library only (and few other similar).  The system/library package
itself contains only few files that requires reboot (libc only).  So
with some effort we probably could make system/library usually
upgradable without reboot (when libc is unchanged) but I think the
bigger problem is that system/library depends on SUNWcs and SUNWcs
contains 48 files that require reboot on update.  And similar cascading
dependencies makes the picture even more complex.


> 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.

To compare with rhel you should consider system/library similarly to
their kernel-* packages.  The main difference is that rhel's kernel
packages are rebuild rarely AND almost no other package depends directly
on them.

OTOH, system/library in OI (and also the rest of "kernel" - the
illumos-gate) is rebuild once a day and almost all pacakges depends on
them (either directly or indirectly).

So the current result is that if you want to stay up-to-date you need to
reboot often.  This is the fee we need to pay with the current way how
OI Hipster is developed and built.

-- 
+-------------------------------------------+
| Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel at telka.sk  |
|                homepage: http://telka.sk/ |
+-------------------------------------------+