Six years with the 4.9 kernel

Posted Jan 17, 2023 9:34 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Six years with the 4.9 kernel by neggles
Parent article: Six years with the 4.9 kernel

If it's impossible to make configuration changes, then it's impossible to get a new workload onto the system, or even new data to process. This surprises me - while I don't work in HPC, I was under the impression that HPC systems get new workloads and data provided on a fairly regular basis after construction.

Given this, regular reboots (which imply short uptimes) are one way to force change management to be done properly - because configuration that's not persisted is lost every time the system reboots. It's not the only way; if the system administrators are suitably disciplined, and the only way for non-administrators to get access is to submit jobs via tooling (e.g. running qsub) that takes care of ensuring that changes do not persist between jobs, then you've got change management that way, and don't need regular reboots.