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Fedora Introduces Offline Updates

Posted by samzenpus on from the while-you-sleep dept.

itwbennett writes "Thanks to a new feature approved this week by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, you won't hear Fedora 18 users bragging about systems that have been running continuously for months on end. 'Fedora's new Offline System Update feature will change the current system to something that is more Windows- and OS X-like: while many updates can still be made on the fly, certain package updates will require the system to be restarted so the patches can be applied in a special mode, according to the Fedora wiki page on the feature,' writes blogger Brian Proffitt."

1 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Everyone calm down by Fnord · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ok, you guys (and TFA) seriously missunderstand this feature, and yes it is a feature. This won't affect any update that doesn't already require a reboot. The difference is that currently if you update a critical system library, everything that depends on that library has the potential to act in an unstable manner until the next reboot occurs. This change says that if you're updating one of those libraries, the update doesn't actually happen at package install time, it gets scheduled to occur on the next reboot. That's it. No more extra reboots, just more stability and updates scheduled for boot time.

    The fact that windows has this feature isn't a problem, its the fact that it requires it on nearly every dll update. The reason for this is that windows locks files when they're in use, so its actually impossible to update the file until the services that use it (which are often core system services) are stopped, ie at boot time. Linux has avoided this by making its filesystem be refcounted. If a file is in use and you delete it, it stays there until the thing using it exits. So library updates just delete the old library and install a new one, while programs using the old library continue to until they're restarted. This works until you have something dynamically loading stuff, or when you have ipc between programs using the different versions of the library, or a million other modern techniques that unix designers didn't think of.

    Anyway, this really is not the travesty everyone here thinks it is.