On Tue, 2011-06-28 at 17:14 +0100, Bryn M. Reeves wrote: > On 06/28/2011 05:07 PM, Andrew Haley wrote: > > On 06/28/2011 04:59 PM, Petrus de Calguarium wrote: > >> It is common knowledge that one does not need to reboot for updates to take > >> effect in GNU Linux. > >> > >> However, in actual practice, this is not so. I could cite many examples, but > >> this should suffice: > >> > >> On Sunday evening, I installed a new updates-testing version of mesa and then I > >> suspended the machine for the night. The following Monday morning (yesterday), > >> I resumed the machine and suspended it again around noon. I again resumed the > >> machine at about suppertime and _powered_ _it_ _down_ about 2 hours later. An > >> hour or two after that, I powered it back up and the mesa testing update turned > >> out to be bad and I was not able to log in. I did not know which program was at > >> fault, because the bad program had been installed over 24 hours prior, but was > >> only showing itself to be bad after a power off. > >> > >> Could someone explain how reboots are not needed in Linux for updates to > >> _take_, given the evidence to the contrary. > > > > If a process has a file open and that file is replaced with a new copy, > > the process is still using the file handle for the old file. This is > > normal UNIX, nothing new. How could it be otherwise? > > Or to put it in simpler terms: when you update a component you need to re-start > the application(s) that use that component. When that is a component of the > whole desktop environment (like mesa) you will need to log out of your session > and log back in again. > > For a couple of releases now the graphical updater tools have supported the > ability to warn the user when this is the case. If you were using these tools > then you should have received such a warning. > > Note that suspending and resuming does not count here since you are simply > suspending the running (old) copy and then resuming it with open files and other > state intact. After updating, I always run needs-restarting to see what running processes are affected. I'm surprised more people don't seem to know about this program. BTW it's a Python script of only a couple of pages in length. Figuring out how it works is a good exercise in understanding Linux (not to mention Python :-) poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
