Best practice to keep PVE host up-to-date without rebooting?

[Tony]

Hi,

what is the recommended way to keep PVE nodes up-to-dated? For now I do manually

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

which I don't mind too much, except that sometime the kernel is updated and hence I do a reboot, just to be on the safe side. But I'd prefer to avoid rebooting the nodes unless it's absolutely necessary.

How about holding the kernel package from updating once the node has been configured and runs as expected?

Regards,
Tony

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi,

which I don't mind too much, except that sometime the kernel is updated and hence I do a reboot, just to be on the safe side

On Proxmox VE (and also on Debian) this isn't necessary from a technical POV. We ensure that we ship a different named kernel package if the ABI actually changes which is checked automatically after each kernel build.
That way the compatible modules from the running kernel are still kept and can always get loaded. This is not the same in some other Distros, like for example Arch Linux, which just does not care about that (as its extra work and their user basis mostly doesn't care either) and overwrites all data from the running kernel with the newer one, which means then that loading not yet loaded modules may fail after an update on such systems. With PVE that cannot happen.

How about holding the kernel package from updating once the node has been configured and runs as expected?

For PVE not a hard necessity, while you should reboot into the newer kernel rather sooner than later that is for getting any security/bug fix applied, not from a "I may run into bad things due to newer kernel installed" POV (see above).

 

[Tony]

Hi,


On Proxmox VE (and also on Debian) this isn't necessary from a technical POV. We ensure that we ship a different named kernel package if the ABI actually changes which is checked automatically after each kernel build.
That way the compatible modules from the running kernel are still kept and can always get loaded. This is not the same in some other Distros, like for example Arch Linux, which just does not care about that (as its extra work and their user basis mostly doesn't care either) and overwrites all data from the running kernel with the newer one, which means then that loading not yet loaded modules may fail after an update on such systems. With PVE that cannot happen.


For PVE not a hard necessity, while you should reboot into the newer kernel rather sooner than later that is for getting any security/bug fix applied, not from a "I may run into bad things due to newer kernel installed" POV (see above).

thank you for the great reply; just the best one can hope for.

Regards,
Tony

 

[BelCloud]

You could use kernelcare to keep the kernel patched. That's what we are using.