Rebooting after an upgrade? - Was: update-manager --no-focus-on-map ??

[Tony Arnold]

Ralf,

On 02/01/16 12:10, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> even if people shouldn't care about spins of HDDs or the time needed to
> reboot, what is the purpose to reboot after an upgrade, if it isn't
> needed?

My approach is that if Software Updater says it needs a rebot after
installing updates, I reboot, otherwise I leave the system running. I
trust the developers to tell me when I really need to reboot.

> Do you think that many Linux users agree, that generally rebooting after
> each upgrade should be suggested?

I can only speak for myself, but my view is that you should only reboot
if necessary, i.e., when told to by Software Updater.

> Some users, even the so called "averaged users", aren't Windows
> refugees, so it doesn't make sense to recommend something non-standard
> for Linux, IMO it's neither good to recommend this to Windows refugees.

I agree we should not encourage bad habits inherited from Windows!

> Sometimes apps don't free memory, but they could do this even if you
> exited or killed them without an upgrade, this isn't related to
> upgrades, IOW you could recommend to restart the machine each time you
> close an app, especially if an app didn't work correctly.

I've only seen this with zombie processes, which can only be removed
completely by rebooting. But this is quite rare in my experience. Do you
have any other examples? Logging out should completely kill off and free
up any applications started as part of the the login session.

> While even a kernel upgrade, or driver upgrades don't require to restart
> the machine, I wouldn't use kexec or similar and reboot an "averaged
> user's" computer.

I was under the impression that a kernel upgrade always needed a reboot.
I think there was talk of getting rid of this requirement but I don't
believe it is in Ubuntu just yet. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Analyst, University of Manchester.
T: +44 (0) 161 275 6093, F: +44 (0) 705 344 3082,
M: +44 (0) 773 330 0039, E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk