Windows security updates could come with fewer reboots beginning later this year
- Thread starter JournalBot
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I remember when OS X was announced that it supposedly wouldn't require reboots for most things. Seems like it's the one feature that modern OS's have been chasing for a while with little to actually show for it.
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This will help with making users happy while providing a consistent element of their computing. I just have to mention this - Ubuntu has been providing a similar feature : Livepatch
https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch
https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Which is funny, because Linux updates already require rebooting significantly less frequently than Windows.
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With the switch to both OSX and to NT on WinXP both did pretty much end the need for applications to ask you to reboot after installing them or "things might not work right". Security and update reboots have for sure been a much longer march but we're thankfully way past the days of "you changed a feature/setting or installed or removed something, you should really reboot or the system will be unstable". Heck windows 9x wanted to reboot when you changed the color depth
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9x also needed to be rebooted no less than once a fortnight. As much as modern tech can be frustrating and infantalizing, it's a hell of a lot more stable than it used to be.
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Please also less boot-breaking bugs! The last feature upgrade resized the recovery partition and on a lot of machines the process failed and the machines were unable to boot or to be restored to a previous state afterwards. Gave me a couple days of issues. Not on my system thankfully, I can reinstall my daily from a snapshot within 5 minutes.
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I may be living through highly rose-colored glasses using only the pro edition of Windows at home, but I have to reboot my Windows 11 systems once per month due to updates. I’m prompted to do this outside of the active hours that I’ve defined myself and it almost always happens on the known date of patch Tuesday or the next day at the latest. In my book this is an utterly trivial thing to work around to keep my systems updated.
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There was still plenty of bugs in .NET and non-Microsoft apps when libraries were changed underneath them, even if the new file was simply waiting in the wings.
I have zero issue forcing a client reboot once a month. If Microsoft wants to push that to once a quarter, fine, but there's so many apps in the client space that aren't designed to be opened for weeks on end, and hey, telling the user to reboot the machine clears up so many weird issues.
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Classically Linux would let you update files that are in use -- the old file would stay on disk as long as a process had it open, but anything that subsequently accessed the file would get the new one. This does mean that even though "apt update" completed you're not actually updated until the processes using the file are restarted, and you could get some edge cases where the old library in memory would try to load a dependency and get an unexpected version. Kernel updates always required a reboot until the in-memory patching came along.
Windows shows its origins as single user DOS. Handling multiple processes opening a single file was bolted on with network file sharing. The decision was made to just prevent files in use from being deleted, since DOS had no way to track multiple versions. This was carried over to NTFS.
Windows addresses the library version dependencies with the side-by-side archive (SxS).
Windows shows its origins as single user DOS. Handling multiple processes opening a single file was bolted on with network file sharing. The decision was made to just prevent files in use from being deleted, since DOS had no way to track multiple versions. This was carried over to NTFS.
Windows addresses the library version dependencies with the side-by-side archive (SxS).
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Linux has less covered under the kernel itself, which helps, but the major difference is that Linux won't force you to load the updated binaries. It will update on the filesystem, and you need to restart services or restart the system entirely to load the new binaries. That philosophical difference will continue to persist, but this change, to allow more services to update in-memory with an update, will help a lot.
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
I only run Pro as well, and I have never experienced a lot of the obnoxious behavior Home users complain about. Home seems to be where they concentrate the petty annoyances.
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I think Fedora Silverblue (and similar ostree-based distros; SteamOS, Endless, etc) has the best approach to updates: apps are their own things, but they don’t mess around with system updates. The new stuff isn’t there until you reboot.
But the benefit is everything gets written to the disk in the current session, so it really is just a reboot, whether it’s a major update or a tiny bug fix. And also because of that, you can choose to boot the previous version of the OS instead and it just works.
I think it works really well. I appreciate the consistency of it. It’s really clear how it can be evolved as a whole, since there isn’t the usual chaos of different types of updates with different requirements and differently bad user experiences.
I don’t think Windows’ problem has ever been that it required a reboot. It’s the way the bulk of that process happens during the reboot sequence, locking the occasional unlucky system into some weird hours-long purgatory (or worse).
The reason people hate updating Windows isn’t that they have to reboot. It’s that they have no idea what will happen when they do.
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
That's a damned cogent point. Sometimes it's a quick 5 minutes, sometimes it's 2 hours, and the only way to anticipate is to already know how long this particular set of updates generally takes to apply.
My absolute favorite updates are the Windows Server ones that squabble with Defender, such that if you don't know about it and disable Defender before the reboot, you're going to add about 4-8 hours to the restart.
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Right - basically only kernel updates require it (and that can be worked around if you are determined to patch keeping it up).
It also boggles my mind how Linux you have 15-30 minutes of installing stuff and then a regular 30 second reboot even for major version updates, Windows seems like every month is something requiring an hour to install "in the background" and then often MULTIPLE reboots and at least half an hour of "Do not turn off your computer" processing updates during reboots.
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Windows doesn't derive from DOS. It comes from NT which is completely unrelated to DOS but was 'inspired' by VMS. VMS also prevented deleting of in-use files but did had a true versioned file system.
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This is the first report I've heard which states that enabling VBS and Core Isolation will not be required to receive updates, which I'm glad to hear. These must be disable to enable CPU undervolting. For those that undervolt laptops, enabling VBS and core isolation could mean losing 10+% performance, thermal throttling, and significant loss of battery life.
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Checked comments explicitly for this or to post it myself. Happy to not be disappointed.
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My favorite was one of the feature updates at work where I went to sit down and finish something that was months of work due that week for major high profile presentation and after logging in.......I had a totally blank user profile. No files, no customization, nothing.
Talk about major panic while frantically calling IT.
We also had once during the pandemic WFH that some Windows update that somehow flushed cached login credentials so you suddenly woke up and couldn't log into your computer anymore until you took it into the office for long enough to log back in.
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“Dramatically reduced reboot scenarios” have been promised for decades, as a Google search on that phrase will substantiate.
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It’s unbelievable how shoddy the Windows update process still is in this day and age.
I have a 2011-era Mac running 10.12 that I still use sometimes. When it restarts, most of the stuff I had opened is still there, even when the restart occurs due to the system locking up from being completely out of memory.
But a minor Windows update that I didn’t even want anyway? Bam, all of your work is gone. Have a nice day.
I have a 2011-era Mac running 10.12 that I still use sometimes. When it restarts, most of the stuff I had opened is still there, even when the restart occurs due to the system locking up from being completely out of memory.
But a minor Windows update that I didn’t even want anyway? Bam, all of your work is gone. Have a nice day.
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
And each time, it usually is a significant reduction. I think people tend to forget just how bad it used to be. Like somebody posted upthread, changing color depth used to trigger a reboot.
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I think it’s important to separate out —at least in our heads—rebooting a computer once a quarter for the OS versus rebooting a computer much more frequently due to apps and other software.
I’m 100% behind Microsoft’s push…buuuut…I don’t run computers with just Windows on them (or even just Microsoft applications and OS); a periodic reboot — say once a week — usually works wonders across the board.
I’m 100% behind Microsoft’s push…buuuut…I don’t run computers with just Windows on them (or even just Microsoft applications and OS); a periodic reboot — say once a week — usually works wonders across the board.
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At the time the idea was that OS X would follow the Unix environments of the time, which permitted (perhaps required, I actually do not know) updating and patching packages individually and then restarting associated processes. If you have an administrator this can be done. If your user is a regular consumer, it is quite a bit more complicated.
What does get me in Windows is how renaming your computer requires a restart.
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I mean, bash/zsh is still alive and well and still not OO. Yeah, there's python, but you've still got core system tools that feel like the 90s. And Linux has only gotten to Windows levels of driver quality in the last few years. And fighting Linux's chaotic mess of config files buried across the OS ain't great either. Makes the registry look downright civilized.
Not that Windows is a better OS... Just, y'know, every OS has weak points and it looks bad when they play catch-up. Except that the alternative is not playing catch-up, which is strictly worse. I have nothing but scorn for Apple, but I don't feel the need to troll every "new osx/iOS feature announced" thread.
Let's just appreciate that things keep getting better and acknowledge that every OS has miles of room for improvement, yah?
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It'd be nice if they implemented A/B hot switching like ChromeOS.
It would be nice if when I did reboot for an update, it was just a standard reboot rather than having to sit and watch the "Installing Updates Please wait" screen for 15min
It would be nice if when I did reboot for an update, it was just a standard reboot rather than having to sit and watch the "Installing Updates Please wait" screen for 15min
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Voix des Airs
Ars Praefectus
I'd be happy if Windows Security Updates actually, y'know, worked:
("Today" being 2/26/24)
About which Microsoft says (back in early January) "You might observe error 0x80070643 when you check for update in Windows 10. If you click on Windows update history, then you might see update failure for KB5034441. If that is the case, then it is a known issue and Microsoft is working on fixing the issue."
It's apparently still working on it.
("Today" being 2/26/24)
About which Microsoft says (back in early January) "You might observe error 0x80070643 when you check for update in Windows 10. If you click on Windows update history, then you might see update failure for KB5034441. If that is the case, then it is a known issue and Microsoft is working on fixing the issue."
It's apparently still working on it.
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It’ll only work on Pro and Enterprise SKUs and require a clean install to enable.
At least, that’s just how Microsoft tends to roll out new security features. You need a clean install to get a default on.
At least, that’s just how Microsoft tends to roll out new security features. You need a clean install to get a default on.
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Since Microsoft cut almost all of their QA testing their updates have been shit (like deleting user files). So no way this change is going to be smooth sailing. It's definitely going to be even MORE buggy.
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I can recall a long, long time ago in a galaxy....anyway I do recall when installing certain software or even drivers Windows would required a reboot.
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Linux has most updates, except for kernel, without reboots. That is one of the many reasons I dumped Windoze, reboot every time you install something.
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