KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:

> ... but please: do not urge people
> to reboot, ever. There is simply no need at all to reboot, and in the
> ovewhelming majority of use cases it is not necessary at all to use
> the latest kernel available, unless ...

With all due respect, I disagree with that.

I don't generally "reboot to fix it" though that is sometimes the answer. But in the case of having upgraded the system (especially if it's a major dist-upgrade, and in this case a cross-grade), I would normally reboot for several reasons :

1) If the kernel has been upgraded, then (ATM) a reboot is needed to be using it
2) The upgrade process has quite likely done a grub-update - and I'd like to know now, not some random (could be weeks or months) time in the future, whether that grub update is OK. It most likely is, but I think any experienced admin has experienced a non-booting system at some point.
3) There's always the possibility that some process wasn't properly stopped-started during the upgrade - leaving a situation where there's a process running with the old binary and old config which we think we've upgraded. No it shouldn't happen, but I'm fairly certain I've experienced it in the past.

So yes, you are correct that we shouldn't need to reboot (and especially not upgrade-reboot-upgrade-reboot-... rinse and repeat until we run out of upgrades like with Windows), it's a valid thing to do after a major upgrade if we want to be completely 100% certain that were running the kernel we've installed, and running the software & configs we've installed, *AND* that the system will actually boot with the changes we've made.
The only thing worse than having a problem with a system, is having a problem with a system which falsely appears to be a new problem because it's been sat there just waiting for an opportunity to show itself. You're then scratching your head trying to think about what's changed just now, while in reality we need to remember what we changed weeks or months ago.