reboot after updates?, when is it necessary to reboot after yum

[kross]

Hi all,

I was wondering how to tell if a reboot is necessary after doing yum updates? I know that a reboot is needed after a kernel or SSH update for example, but am not sure about which other packages require a reboot.

Thanks,

kross

[RalphEllis]

About the only time that you need to reboot is either a kernel update or a updated version of a module that builds directly from the kernel such as proprietary Nvidia or ATI drivers or Virtualbox drivers. Otherwise logging in and out as a user would update anything such as new fonts for KDE and Gnome. If you had major configuration file changes, a reboot might be necessary but yum will not tell you if there are a lot of configuration file changes. There are yum plugins dealing with configuration file changes but very few people need these.
There really is no memory leakage in Linux unlike Windows. This really does cut down on the downtime for rebooting mission critical systems for anything other than kernel or key security updates linked to the kernel.

[kross]

This is a server, and my concerns are mainly from a security standpoint. I was wondering if there was some way to definitively tell if a reboot is necessary, and the advice to reboot if something is built from the kernel seems like a good place to start, thanks.

kross

[sbergman]

In general, services affected by libraries with new security patches get restarted automatically. The GUI tells you when you need to reboot. But you are probably not using that on your servers. (I don't.) My rule of thumb is to reboot after a kernel upgrade.

BTW, to the person who said Linux doesn't nave memory leaks, a Google search on:

+RHEL +"memory leak"

returns 4.7 million results. No software system as large and complex as even a minimal RHEL install is free of memory leaks. The Valgrind suite has better ongoing job security than most people. ;-)

-Steve