How often do you update and reboot Ubuntu

Curious about how often people run the apt update/upgrade procedure for Ubuntu 18 or 20 and then reboot after that?

5 Replies

It's usually not necessary to reboot unless the update/upgrade does one of two things:

  • installs kernel patches/updates;
  • installs updated kernel components for userland packages (e.g., TLS).

In both cases apt will tell you that you need to reboot.

-- sw

After the "apt upgrade" I often get the message that I'm running "outdated binaries."

I will often get same msg from "sudo needrestart."

I figure that is Ubuntu telling me to reboot.

Yes? No?

(It only takes a minute or two to reboot… no big deal.)

I figure that is Ubuntu telling me to reboot.

Yes. "Outdated binaries" usually mean some daemon you're running has been updated. You can often avoid this by just restarting the service that starts the affected daemon with systemctl. sudo needrestart means some kernel component of a userland package has been updated and you need to reload the kernel. The only way to do that is reboot.

-- sw

I figure that is Ubuntu telling me to reboot.

Yes. "Outdated binaries" usually mean some daemon you're running has been updated. You can often avoid this by just restarting the service that starts the affected daemon with systemctl. sudo needrestart means some kernel component of a userland package has been updated and you need to reload the kernel. The only way to do that is reboot.

-- sw

I figure that is Ubuntu telling me to reboot.

Yes. "Outdated binaries" usually mean some daemon you're running has been updated. You can often avoid this by just restarting the service that starts the affected daemon with systemctl. sudo needrestart means some kernel component of a userland package has been updated and you need to reload the kernel. The only way to do that is reboot.

-- sw

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