On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 9:58 AM Bigsy Bohr <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 2026-01-13, <[email protected]> <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> That literally happens every time you upgrade a running program? > > > > Depends on what you mean by "upgrade a running program". > > I always wondered about that. Say you're running chromium while the > package is upgraded. Of course, I long realized that nothing untoward occurs, > but kind of thought: my running instance will "perdure" until it's > closed, but then that would mean people who never reboot and leave > their browser eternally open would eventually have critical faults in > their navigation software, so that can't be right.
Not necessarily. A reboot can be avoided if a binary is hot patched. But it takes a little magic to make it happen. Namely, there has to be some nop's at each procedure's entry point after epilogue. There also has to be instrumentation to say which procedures have special entry points. Once patched the nop's are converted to a jump into the new binary. Microsoft used to do it through a library called Detours, <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/detours/>. Companies like Canonical provide the service, too. Canonical calls it Livepatch, <https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch>. Personally, I just reboot. I don't care about uptime. Jeff
