Comment by throwaway2048
7 years ago
you can always restart processes, on Windows it is fundamentally impossible to overwrite a running DLL or EXE file. So for example if some services are needed to apply updates, they can never be updated without a reboot.
Yes, I'm aware how Windows file locking works -- in fact you can sometimes rename running executables -- it depends.
Your solution to a rebooting the system being user-unfriendly is... restarting processes? How would that be so much more user-friendly? That's almost the same from a user standpoint, you might as well actually lock down the system and reboot to make sure the user doesn't try to mess with the system during the update.
And on top of all that, if you're actually willing to kill processes, then they won't be locking files anymore in the first place, so now you can update the files normally...
So yeah, I really don't understand how file locking is the actual problem here, despite Linux folks always trying to blame lack of live updates on that. I know I for one easily get errors after updating libraries on e.g. Ubuntu making programs or the desktop constantly crash until I reboot... if anything, that's far less user-friendly.
Not all applications need to restart, most updates will effect things that are not the running application (Office suite/webbrowser/game/whatever) ? Meanwhile your entire system has to restart.
"Most updates" won't affect running applications? What DLLs do you imagine "most updates" affect that are not in use by MS Office, Chrome, games, etc.? Pretty much everything I can imagine would be used all over the system, not merely coincidentally by desktop applications, but especially by desktop applications... if anything, it'd usually be the other way around, where some background services wouldn't need to be killed (because they sometimes only depend on a handful of DLLs), but many applications would (which can have insane dependency graphs). But both applications and background services also use IPC to interact with other processes (sometimes internally through Windows DLLs, not necessarily explicitly coded by them) which could well mean that they would need to be restarted if those processes need to be updated...
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>So for example if some services are needed to apply updates, they can never be updated without a reboot
I wouldn't say never. Hotpatching was introduced in windows server 2003[1]. However, it's seldom available for windows update patches, and even if it's available, you have to opt-in (using a command line flag) to actually use it.
[1] https://jpassing.com/2011/05/01/windows-hotpatching/
IIRC this is because under memory pressure, files can be paged out to their existing disk location, rather than taking up extra space in swap.