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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

> allowing you to delete an open file and providing no means to prevent it

What exactly do you mean by “providing no means to prevent it”?

Like Windows file share mode. Mandatory, "hard" lock on a file. The OS doesn't let you delete it if another process holds it open. (You can forbid any of 3: reading, writing, deleting by another process. It is completely orthogonal to the ACL permissions system.)

And it’s the reason you need to reboot all the time.

??? All the time? I reboot ca once a month, for windows update.

You can update Linux without rebooting, except for the kernel (and even then there's options). Rebooting once a month is way more often than some of my Linux systems.

Eh. What about updated libc.so or libssl.so? If daemons using them do not get restarted, they keep using the old version. If they do get restarted, well, then, it's just as if you rebooted the machine. Somewhat quicker, but in effect it's a reboot.

> but in effect it's a reboot

no. restarting some daemons one by one when it's convenient is wildly different from taking down the entire system

And you will never know if the updated libs cause segfaults (at best) or shenanigans (at worst).

You can replace the open files on Windows (most oth time, see my other comment here), but the decision to reboot is not a technical one (and back in the days many invested in no reboot upgrades) but to have less headache on a corner cases.

And most of the time you can just rename the problematic file and place another on the same path. Used this trick a lot in my days.

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