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by zyx321 4418 days ago
>And if you do reboot frequently but then at one point it doesn't work ?

Then you restore from yesterday's backup. It's probably still on-site. If a kernel live patch fails, you might not notice for a long time.

1 comments

My point is you should always be prepared that a reboot doesn't work, since it could happen at any time between your maintenance windows.

Frequently exercising a feature is a good idea, especially when you depend on that feature. That's why exercising backup restores is important; you want that to work when you need it. Do you really need a production machine to boot when you need it? I think is a wrong target to optimize for, given that that failure more is already covered by backups cold/hot secondary as long as you do exercise them frequently.

That said, you do have a point about whether a live patch is reliable, but this doesn't have anything to do with whether increasing the average uptime of a host is a good or bad idea w.r.t to ensuring that the machine can start or not.

TBH I wouldn't personally feel much comfortable using this live update thing, but I have no experience with it. I'd be curious to know more though.