Is a restart REALLY required after an upgrade?

[Craig Hagerman]

On 4/12/06, Max Andersen <max at militant.dk> wrote:
> Craig Hagerman wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am using Dapper Drake. I have been running apt-get update and
> > apt-get dist-upgrade once a week or so to make sure everything is up
> > to date. There is a new icon in Dapper in that says "restart
> > required". If you mouse over it it tells you that some security
> > updates won't be effective until you restart.
> >
> > What is up with this. I have another machine running debian unstable.
> > It has been up for months, through many upgrades with no need to
> > restart. I was under the impression that *nix systems didn't need to
> > be restarted unless you wanted to switch to using a newer kernel. Can
> > someone tell me - do I REALLY have to restart the machine after an
> > upgrade? and if so why?
> >
> > Craig
> >
> >
>
> haven't you just got kernel 2.6.15-20? or what packages are you talking
> about? might be if a heavy load of packages has landed on your machine,
> and the changes are so heavy that the instructions on how to 'reload'
> the configuration might be too exhaustive.
>
> but more enlightened people might help, if you specify what packages
> exactly you installed that requires a restart.
>
> Max
>



There has been so many that I couldn't begin to list them. Afterall
Dapper is in the final stages of becoming official so things are
changing often. However, the kernel hasn't changed (as far as I know).
And I would be surprised if it were true that the changes were 'so
heavy' that everything needs to be reset with a shutdown. apt-get
intelligently stops and restarts running daemons, askes about updating
config files and generally seems to be able to upgrade seemlessly.

As I mentioned I have also been running a debian amd64 unstable
machine for 3 years now and have been though hundreds of
dist-upgrades. It is on 24/7 and I rarely reboot, and NEVER because of
any new upgrade (other than kernel).

Craig