Hacker News Reader

But the Kernel is not the only reason, a system has to be restarted. What about changed dynamic libraries? It can be a mess to fiddle out, which processes has to be restarted, so a reboot is normally the best solution for critical patches (eg. in the glibc).

View on HN

I agree. Especially stuff like init, or non obvious non-trivial system services (and, of course, in the case of these distros, systemd).

Supposedly systemd has a "restart in place" option. But if it fails you are staring at a reboot anyways.

Hasn't failed for me so far.

Perhaps, but the fact that it could fail means that you have to be prepared for a server outage when you attempt it anyway. In which case... the utility of 'rebootless patching' goes down a lot, because why not just reboot it?

Because there's less downtime in the vast majority of cases?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com