this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It's a cool feature, and I played with it some, but I don't really see how to use it in a home or small office environment unless you're willing to subscribe to someone who can generate the live patches for you.
I can certainly generate the patches myself, but it's much faster to let the maintainer of my distro's kernel handle shipping new packages and accepting the reboot. My system reboots really quickly.
If high reliability is a concern, I would suggest load balancing or some other horizontally scaled solution such that you're not impacted by one machine going down. Because they will go down for things other than updates!
Not rebooting for a long time makes me nervous once I actually reboot, as I might've changed something but didn't make it persistent. Luckily I've become much better with documenting chabges after switching to NixOS.
It also means booting is untested until something like a hardware fault or a power outage forces it onto you and you have to deal with any reboot issues at the worst possible time and a time you did not choose.
There are some cases, where scaling is relatively hard to achieve in a sane manner. Especially when you're in that weird place where you've grown out of the SME solutions, but can't really justify the enterprise solution yet. I've worked on such a project, switching to the big boy DB cluster was pushed back again and again because of very high upfront costs (licenses and staff).