On Sun, 04 Mar 2018 20:47:15 +0000, Alex Arvelaez said:
You can kexec into the newer kernel to avoid rebooting if you absolutely must but yeah the best practice is to keep your system up to date and that requires some disruption of service.
If you can't afford the disruption of service a reboot causes, you *really* need to be deploying HA or load-balancer solutions. Because if you can't afford a reboot's worth of 15-20 minutes of downtime, you *really* can't afford the 6-8 hours you're probably going to be down if a chip soldered onto the motherboard/backplane fries. (All of $DAYJOB's important systems are behind HA or load-balancers, as well as HA-capable storage. Let's just say that some vendors make it easier than others to set up 8+2 RAID6 across 10 separate shelves of storage, and designing mutli-petabyte solutions without single points of failure is harder than it looks :)