tags 886611 fixed-upstream
thanks
Hi pabs,
I was able to add some microcode parsing for AMD (see also
https://github.com/liske/needrestart/issues/150). It will be a
experimental feature of the upcoming needrestart 3.5 release.
HTH,
Thomas
On Mon, 8 Jan 2018, Paul Wise wrote:
On Mon, 2018-01-08 at 08:00 +0100, Thomas Liske wrote:
checking if initramfs is newer than uptime might be a good idea
Possibly, but there might be false positives if the initramfs was
regenerated without having updated any files in it. Also, not every
initramfs contains files that are currently loaded/running. Only ones
that are include microcode and Linux kernel modules, but see below.
A reboot may be also required due to updates of 3rd party
kernel modules (like DKMS) if they are part of the initramfs.
Those can often just be unloaded and then reloaded again.
It would be good to detect when that is needed and possible, but Linux
doesn't seem to expose any info about the filesystem timestamp of the
currently loaded modules.
Once that is exposed, then you would have to determine if any resources
the modules expose are being used by any processes/mounts/etc.
Ones that aren't being used can just be unloaded/reloaded if they are
compatible with the current Linux kernel ABI.
Ones that are used will need a complicated dance where the services are
stopped (or processes stopped), the module reloaded and services
started again.
I would avoid to parse the initramfs in needrestart (would need to
handle different compression and archive file types etc.) just to look
for the microcode files. Report and recommend a reboot if there is an
updated initramfs should be sufficient, shouldn't it?
Agreed, this is why I suggested to look at the files from the AMD
microcode package instead. As explained above, I think that would
result in some false positives. Since reboots are costly for some
systems, I would recommend avoiding those false positives.
--
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