Vista To Be Updated Without Reboots 632
UltimaGuy writes "Microsoft is working on a new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which will update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine. From the article: 'If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot.'"
funny department (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:funny department (Score:5, Funny)
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the fine print:
And if it CAN'T clear that part of the system? <mentok voice>REBOOT!</mentok voice>
So, I'm not sure how this is much different than before, aside from Vista will try to unload unused system dlls as well as non-system dlls?
See, that is the point (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:funny department (Score:3, Funny)
Linux kernel hacke
Re:funny department (Score:4, Informative)
Re:funny department (Score:4, Funny)
Sincerely,
That's Unpossible!
Re:funny department (Score:4, Insightful)
Maby the last kid that crossed gets all the attention because he's "special."
It's the same way when I show people Windows Remote Desktop.... they act like it's a big deal.
Unix had "remote destop technology" before most Unix users could afford computer monitors.
And even then, Unix was late to the party many times - I've been put in my place by old geezers when they say... "Well, my PDP-8 did that too. With punch-cards."
Re:funny department (Score:3, Funny)
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure you can adapt server tools like X11 to do remote access, but then remote desktop involves more: can you see your local hard drive from the applications on the desktop machine that you're remoting into? Can you see your local printer, so the printouts come where you are by default and not on the printer that is connected to the remote PC? Can you hear sounds played by applications when you remote into a PC?
Same thing with fast user switching... many people said, on Linux you have long been able to open many virtual consoles under different identities... Just Ctrl+Fn between them... Ah yes but what happens when you switch consoles? Notice how it doesn't ask for your password? Which makes it applicable in many settings, contrary to the Mac or Windows versions of fast user switching which do ask for password. Feature comes in late, but right.
As to changing OS components while running... Sure, Linux has had kernel modules, FreeBSD has had a microkernel... but is there a tool to automate dependency checking, to see which services need to be shut down, to actually shut them down / unload modules, and then relaunch services?
Unix OS's "can do" a lot of things, if you accept that many of the capabilities are pushed out of the OS onto the end-user. Actually if you start thinking this way, coding pure assembly in kernel mode actually has the most features!!
Re:funny department (Score:4, Insightful)
No need for that in a proper system.
Let's say I want to upgrade Samba: In Unix, while the system is running, I upgrade the binaries right over the old versions. Unix is smart enough to keep the old version around and all clients that are in use continue to work just.
Any new client gets the new version.
As old sessions drop off over the next few weeks they get the new version when the reconnect. When the last old session dies, then you're fully migrated and none of the users ever noticed.
No need for "automared dependence checking" when your system was designed properly in the first place.
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:funny department (Score:3, Insightful)
For most purpouses - you can sometimes assume that the curent useres of your service are not malicious. New ones coming online could be malicious because they have access to security exploit. This is a decision for the human to make and not the OS. If I feel that the security vuln
Re:funny department (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that a bit drastic?
Re:funny department (Score:3, Funny)
But on mine, I have a well preserved sound effect of a thumb flipping across the edge of a stack of cards.
Re:funny department (Score:2)
Brainiac.
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:funny department (Score:4, Insightful)
This is about fixing a long-standing user complaint. Why must there always be a comparison?
Probably because "long-standing" doesn't really do it justice. The problem has existed in all Windows versions up to and including the ones that exist today. The comparison is because Unix and variants overcame the problem what, years? decades? ago. Imagine them saying that Vista is going to patch a 20year hole in IE, most people would compare to alternatives and say wtf took them so long...
Re:funny department (Score:4, Insightful)
don't you think Apple (one of the, if not *the* biggest Unix distro)
Heh, ok I almost laughed at that. If you seriously think Apple is the biggest Unix distro, you have a seriously myopic view of the Unix world. Of course perhaps you were referring to *BSD (encompassing all derivatives) instead of "Apple".
Sure it might be theoretically possible in some lab setting, but the simple fact of the matter is that the Unix distribution I use every day doesn't, and so it can't be nearly as simple to accomplish as you seem to assume it is.
I'm not a kernel programmer (I have written drivers however), but I imagine it all has to do with the modularity of the kernel and subsystems. On the HPUX and Linux boxes I use daily, and also the Sun boxes I used to use, restarting core services - NFS, automount, etc. never required a reboot. Shutdown and restart the process and your good to go. Adding applications and libraries on said systems hasn't required rebooting either. I've installed major application suites (Cadence, Mentor Graphics), X, major libraries (perl, java, etc), cups print services, and so on - none of which required a reboot. Even something as invasive as swapping the video drivers can be done without a reboot. Exit X (or init 3), adjust startup script, restart X - all done.
On the flip side however is Windows, where when I installed my HP "plug-and-play" printer, it required rebooting -halfway- through the driver installation, and then again(!) after the drivers were fully installed. As near as I can tell everytime some stupid little app or game tries to install a dll it requires a reboot. The drivers for my digital camera and scanner were the same way. Why the heck do you have to reboot the whole machine to install a usb driver is beyond me. Perhaps its the peripheral manufacturer writing bad drivers, mabye its Windows, heck if I know, but thats the way it is.
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows wasn't able to do this before, now it is.
What with the kid that keeps thinking that Windows and UNIX are the same and features in each have to mirror each other.
Re:funny department (Score:5, Funny)
Re:funny department (Score:5, Funny)
Why does every topic have to come down to politics and the Bush administration?
Re:funny department (Score:5, Interesting)
Unix systems gladly replace system libraries that are in use, and just hope that not problems happen because two different versions of the same library are in use simultaneously. The further away from the core libraries you get, the lower the odds of a problem, but it's still a risk. The Unix approach is basically "Let's just go ahead and do it, it'll probably be ok."
Windows takes the safe approach of only updating libraries that are not in use. I'm sure you'd wind up with weird glitches if your apps were using multiple versions of GDI simultaneously. The Windows approach is "It may be ok to update this now, or it may not. Just to be safe, let's not update it until we can guarentee it's safe."
The Vista implementation is going to try to free up libraries, and if it can, will then update them in place. If not, you'll still have to reboot.
Re:funny department (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:funny department (Score:4, Informative)
Define "in use". If it's a program that's currently running and using it, no it doesn't. Even if the old library gets unlinked (deleted) it doesn't go away until the last process using it has exited. New libraries are named by their version (foo.so.X.Y.Z). Old ones go on living and things that are using them keep on using them.
Even programs that depend on older major versions of the library can coexist without anything special; minor versions are assumed to be binary compatible (and should be), but even if not you can manually specify which library to link if it comes down to that (like, if you broke the box and you need to rebuild it without rebooting).
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
All programs that start after library has been updated use the updated version.
The main issue is that in windows, two files can not exist under the same name (no concept of linking). (well, sort of. I am not sure if NTFS streams can be used for this.)
Re:funny department (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite - it's more general than that. When a file that an application has open is deleted, the link to it is removed (so you can't see it any more, nothing else can access it, etc) but the data is left in place and any file handles remain valid. Once the last handle to it is closed, then the inodes are marked as being free.
That's the case for *any* file, be it a library, an mp3, a text file, etc.
For what it's worth, I can see situations in which replacing a library that's in use could be problematic. If you start another instance of the app that's using it, for example, and the library that's changed defines a communications protocol, then you may well have problems if the two instances try to communicate. That may be relatively ok if it's an instant message system, but not so good if it's something more critical like an RDBMS. Not likely, perhaps, but not impossible.
The main issue is that in windows, two files can not exist under the same name (no concept of linking).
The same is true of Linux. In the case of deleting a file that's in use and replacing it with a new copy, there are not two files with the same name. There is one file with the name, and an area of data that is no longer linked to. That area of data *used* to have that name, but doesn't any longer.
When deleting a file that's in use, an OS has three options:
1. Delete it anyway and damn the consequences
2. Delete it but keep the data available for the application(s) using it (the Linux way)
3. Prevent deletion of the file (the Windows way)
Note that 3 isn't the only way it works under Windows, it depends how the file was opened. For example, WMP is perfectly happy to allow you to delete media files while you're playing them, notepad is fine with text files disappearing out from under it, etc.
Re:funny department (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens when you upgrade a package?
When an opened file is removed from the file system, its directory entry is removed, but the inode stays on disk as long as the file stays open. So old libraries remain on disk as long as old programs are using them, which essentially creates a parallel world of different library versions---one accessible from the file system, and the other accessible from existing running programs with open file descriptors. When the program restarts, it then uses the new library.
Re:funny department (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Your Unix installations save the current environment when they need a reboot (for, oh say, a kernel update) and restore it completely when finished?
What this appears to do is considerably more than just try to avoid reboots (which, while improved under XP, still happen way too damn much -- for both OS and "application" patches), it actually tries to make a reboot a non-event as far as the user is concerned.
It won't work though. There's too many potential issues -- most of them security related. If you're logged in on a network it would have to remember your login info to restore that. What if you're logged into remote connections, like ssh sessions? Or ftp? Or your web banking? While these might be solvable, my guess is that solving some of them (like retaining the SSL session for the web banking) would involve some pretty massive potential security holes beyond just remembering passwords that it shouldn't.
Fixing the real issues would require a massive rewrite of the file systems, the memory manager (esp. virtual memory), and other key OS components. Unix has done it right for a long time in this regard -- delete a file in use? Sure, no problem. But it's not actually de-allocated from the FS until the current process releases it. This has its own set of issues, but they're much more managable than the ones that exist with Windows' current methods. Better yet would be inherent versioning, ala VMS's FS. Certainly disk space is cheap now compared to back then -- it's surprising that nobody's revisited this.
Re:funny department (Score:2)
Wow...Bill Gates has really let himself go...
Re:I'll believe it (Score:4, Insightful)
WinXP was supposed to have the restart without reboot feature.
The only way I can see Vista as having this feature is if Microsoft finally includes signalling (ala Unix/Linux and most other professional operating systems).
No Reboot (Score:5, Funny)
Wow... Took only 30 years to catch up... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've had the ability to kill services (daemons), upgrade them, and restart them without rebooting the system for years.
yet another Microsoft "innovation" that is decades behind the competition.
Re:Wow... Took only 30 years to catch up... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow... Took only 30 years to catch up... (Score:2)
Re:Wow... Took only 30 years to catch up... (Score:3, Insightful)
With Windows Vista, users won't have to restart their computers for most updates and application installations. Windows Vista knows which applications and services are using which files, and if a file needs to be updated, Windows Vista can coordinate saving the application's data, closing the application or stopping the service, updating the file, and automatically reopening the application or restarting the service. This capability is provided by a feature called Resta
Re:Wow... Took only 30 years to catch up... (Score:3, Informative)
There's tons of GUI applications to shutdown and restart services on UNIX these days. Plus, some package managers are smart enough to shutdown a service, apply the updated files, copy over the settings, if some configuration files have been altered and then restart the service.
ALL FROM A GUI!
Again, welcome to the world of the future Mr. MS Apologist.
Oh, UNIX has had "Restart... (Score:5, Funny)
They are typically called System Administrators.
Yes, but will it ask permission first? (Score:5, Informative)
At least when one had to reboot to update, one could usually make an informed choice whether to interupt one's work, close everything, and reboot. One can only assume that the "update without reboot" process will not be without risk. That is not a slam against MS; software isn't perfect. One way we deal with such imperfection is by minimizing the consequences of a crash or fault.
What if "update without reboot" is, in the name of consumer friendliness, as well as in the supposed interest of the "mommies and daddies out there," both automatic and invisible, and something goes wrong and/or is corrupted in the middle of a vastly important project?
There is safety in being forced to reboot. It means you aren't doing something else.
Fixing DLL management... what a novel concept (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the problem has always been that their DLL manager couldn't clean itself up without a reboot.
Re:Fixing DLL management... what a novel concept (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista now uses much better compontentization, and this allows them to actually know what components were affected by an upgrade, and need to be restarted.
In the *nix world, everything's been compontentized from the start, and so naturally you were able to restart services instead of the whole machine fro mthe beginning.
Re:Fixing DLL management... what a novel concept (Score:3, Insightful)
. . . that is, until the application vendors (including Microsoft's own developers) get ahold of the system.
Linux (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Linux (Score:3)
Obviously it is always safest to just reboot, but sometimes that is not th
hmm (Score:2, Funny)
The question (Score:4, Funny)
As an IT Employee... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:As an IT Employee... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:As an IT Employee... (Score:2)
hmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, and I am sure NOTHING could go wrong there...
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Ready for the desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ready for the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft took their time with this because they could. Whereas, with Windows XP going forward, they've emphasized startup times -- because that's what Joe User looks at.
Finally.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware.
Re:Finally.. (Score:2)
-Jesse
Re:Finally.. (Score:2)
Re:Finally.. (Score:3, Funny)
In my experience, Linux devs are smug geeks who think they're hardcore because they build the apps they use from the source. The last Linux dev I worked with was a goddamn fucking incompetent muppet*. What's your point?
There are idiots in every profession. I've worked with lots of Windows devs, and I've never met one who loved 'their restarts and drive defrags'.
Btw:
So now I only have to reboot once.... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, Lordy! (Score:5, Insightful)
It has "fragile" written all over it.
I suppose that there are reasons why Microsoft can't just leave an inode in place after unlinking it so that processes that use it don't lose it, but is this really the best workaround they can come up with?
Re:Oh, Lordy! (Score:2)
For a server, yeah, this could be important (if its reliable).
Re:Oh, Lordy! (Score:3, Informative)
This is the result of a (now decades old) decision waaaayyy back in the DOS days. DOS, as you may well know, was originally very much a single-user, single-tasking O/S. Many have said that it doesn't even qualify as an "Operating System" and was really little more than an interrupt handler. Whatever. Call it whatever you will, A rose by any other name i [slashdot.org]
An integral part... (Score:5, Funny)
How innovative (Score:2, Funny)
Innovation! (Score:2)
If it's New... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm (Score:2)
Even with current Windows OS's, the number of "reboot your machine for this change to take effect" messages isn't enough: the first piece of advice on any trouble is "reboot and see if the problem still occurs". All I can see the Restart Manager changing, is the advice line. Now it will be "I know the Restart Manager said you don't need to reboot, but try it anyway, OK!".
Ok, ok, But what if... (Score:2)
What if it can't do it without a reboot? Does the system then have to shutdown and mess everything up?
One
Really? (Score:2)
Then I losen up a little and get back to work.
Seriously, where's the innovation in "no reboots?"
So LongWait is fixing all of their current product problems? That means I *gotta* upgrade!
Something tells me they're going to do it right *this* time. I mean they can't overpromise *again* can they? No way!
Enough Updaters? (Score:2)
Think there are enough updaters out there? I mean, OS X does this with one updater, and you just pick the relevant updates. It seems like that would be better. That way there is no need to access like 5 updaters, you can just use one.
This isn't a straight "OS X ROXXORS!!" comment, I'm just wonder why you need 5 updaters.
Is Linux considered an Upgrade? (Score:2)
Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft acts like a kid who won't eat his vegetables, won't do his homework, won't clean up after himself and won't take out the garbage and yells, "Hey, hey Ma look! I can balance a beachball on my nose! Aren't you proud of what a clever boy I am?"
I'd like to take Billg by the hair and tell him, "No Windows Vista for you young man until you fix all the broken crap in XP! And stop making faces at cousin Linus."
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:5, Informative)
It's that way with a lot of things, for example I have a Wireless card that was sold AFTER the release of WPA but its drivers were never updated to work with WPA because they decided to abandon a perfectly fine card. If you contact the company they'll admit it no problem, they know they can get away with it and make even more money by doing something else.
For a lot of companies money comes before security. Unfortunately, thanks to a large ignorant user base (not everyone, but the majority), this is a perfectly fine business model for them.
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have often felt honestly bad for my Windows counterparts when it comes to patch time and they have to go through the pain of arranging down times and outages with their customers, sometimes stretching their patch time frame out for weeks.
While it's a long way from curing all of their ills, this is a welcome step.
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:4, Informative)
Windows XP is stable. It's the third-party device drivers that cause the vast majority of the problems. Seriously, get the drivers right and the box will stay up as long as any Linux box. I've got an old PC as a media player, it's got hardly any cruft on it and it's rock solid. I'd quote the uptime, but it's low at the moment due to me doing some electrical work in my flat recently. The only thing that forces a reboot is the odd Windows Update, which is sounds like they've now sorted. Nice. Uptime is stability.
Once the makers of the thousand hardware devices start bundling close-sourced drivers for Linux, you'll see the exact same problems there. I mention closed-source specifically, as the ones that provide OSS drivers "get it" and will have theirs fixed for them as and when required.
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Stability is one of the main reasons that I ran OS/2 2.0 through 3.0 back in the mid-late 90s. My OS/2 box would stay up and running for ~2 weeks at a time, as opposed to the non-stability of Win 3.1 and Win95. (I would dual-boot to Win95 to run a few games, but that was it.)
NT4 wasn't bad. I ran that for a few years before Win2000 came out. Win2000 was nicer because more things would run (Win2K server seemed to be more stable then NT4). Never had many issues with
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:3)
And you call this stable??
"XP is stable and only crashes due to bad device drivers... unless I install some software, apply a patch, it just works itself into a
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:3, Informative)
This is believable. Windows has gotten a lot more stable with 2K/XP.
I've had things like the desktop lock up on me but killing and restarting explorer.exe with the task manager seems to cure that.
I've found that a lot of times in 2k/XP , if explorer starts chewing through memory due to a leak somewhere, using the task manager to kill and restart explorer.exe usually only provides a temporary fix, with the system becoming unstable again soon.
Meanw
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what you mean by a "serious crash" but both my windows 2000 machine and XP machine crash pretty regularly. Not twice a day like windows 9x did but at least twice a week.
I suspect you are not really doing anything serious with your machine if your windows hasn't crashed in four years. In fact I doubt you are even using it if your windows
Re:Microsoft acts like a kid. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe another security hole... (Score:3, Interesting)
A "Restart Manager"? How typical. (Score:5, Funny)
Based on Transactional NTFS (Score:3, Interesting)
It is pretty cool stuff.. some early sample code from one of the developers is here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/archive/2005
Alas, the immutable locked-file-is-in-use problem has to be fixed one Win32::CreateFile() call at a time.
I suppose CreateFile calls without FILE_SHARE_READ (and no FILE_SHARE_WRITE) could be overridden and converted into TNTFS which would solve a huge amount of stupid lock problems.
"Vista To Be Updated Without Robots?" (Score:3, Funny)
It'll never happen (Score:5, Funny)
Great job, Microsoft! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oops, wrong company...
But seriously, why do people criticize Microsoft so much for requiring occasional reboots when a much simpler application, Firefox, requires a restart every time an extension is installed. It seems like a browser extension would be much easier to load on-the-fly than an update to a core part of an operating system, so why not harp on Firefox? Is it because it isn't a Microsoft product? There are plenty of threads in this story's comments bashing Microsoft, saying it's about time they got their act together regarding reboots, etc. But what if Mozilla suddenly announced Firefox 1.5.1 would be able to load extensions on-the-fly? Everyone would cheer for Firefox and sing praises of such an innovative new feature. This story just reminded me of the double standard regarding Microsoft and, well, everyone that isn't Microsoft.
This new Windows feature sounds cool and it doesn't. I don't really care about rebooting, to be honest. It takes 30 seconds of my time (big deal). Stop adding things like this to Vista and just get it done and shipped. I'm still not going to use Vista for moral (DRM) reasons, but still... there must be some people who want it done sooner rather than later.
Re:Great job, Microsoft! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because when I am asked to restart firefox I don't have to send a company-wide memo that all employees accessing server X will be unable to from 12:00AM to 12:05AM---assuming no problems otherwise it's 12:00AM to when the hell ever we figure out what went wrong on reboot of a production server.
But I agree that having the restart firefox is a pain when I'm just trying to surf the web.
Re:Great job, Microsoft! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great job, Microsoft! (Score:3, Insightful)
You will be amazed.
Mark
You take your fea-ture out.. You put your feat.. (Score:2)
First they say that they're dropping features to make release.
Then they say they're going to release ahead of schedule.
Then they say they're now going to add a capability that *none* of the prior releases have had - six to eight months from their target release date?
Huh?!
Shake it all about..
Re:Lets get it out of the way right now.... (Score:5, Informative)
Your mac most definitely has not done this for years. Even updating Safari requires a reboot on OSX. My mac can't go a week without Software Update asking for a reboot.
Re:Lets get it out of the way right now.... (Score:2, Informative)
This is really just a sign of poorly composed installers. Apple's PackageMaker tools allow the installer to require a restart. However, it's trivial to extract a package's components by hand, unlink any in use kexts or halt any processes with open files that need to be updated, and place the new files from the package where the belong. Then y
Re:Lets get it out of the way right now.... (Score:3, Funny)
Are you entirely sure you know what "trivial" means?
Re:Lets get it out of the way right now.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Here comes another security hole! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Here comes another security hole! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Here comes another security hole! (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, so what happens when someone learsn to trick this reboot manager into doing theiur bidding. Say a virus, trojan, or worm "learns" how to get this thing to work for it. It's a system process right? Thus should have some pretty hefty access priviliges and probably a million holes to have to plug. I'm waiting for the new generation of bugs and security holes that can be exploited just from one new aspect of this OS. Way to go Microsoft!
Well, at least you won't have to reboot.
Re:GEEZ FINALLY! (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's only taking you 17 seconds, it's clear that y