With libraries the issue is known and mostly (if not fully) handled already.
Library updates need no such special handling: unless done improperly (by a direct write rather than rename), the old copy would still be present with running processes whereas the on-copy version (and the one used by new processes) will be updates.
This leaves you with long-running processes to restart at your own free time. But that does not require a complete reboot.
Specifically the update procedure of libc on Debian conditionally restarts several daemons, and will always restart the init process. And you can always use "telinit u" to do the latter manually.
Posted Jul 13, 2009 9:05 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
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There should be a better way to fix long-running processes than restarting them, more in the line of what Ksplice does. As long as the interface has not changed (function parameters and struct layout if we speak of plain C) it should be doable.