I thought more recent OS had ways to update files currently in use and not require reboots.
Corporate policy of rebooting once a week and forcing it is killing me: I usually have tens of excel windows interlinked, and having to reboot daily just saps my will to live….
In: 68
When you apply an update to an OS a couple of things could be happening. The first is that you could be updating some OS service. In these cases the OS should simply be able to stop the service, update the files, and then restart the service.
The other thing that could be happening is that a core component of the OS could be getting that update. We call this part the kernel, and everything the OS does is centered on the kernel. Just like with a service, and kernel would need to be stopped, updated, and then restarted. However, stopping the kernel would stop the OS. The simplest way to deal with this is to have 1 or more reboots occur during an update to allow a piece of the kernel to update and then restart the whole thing.
The reason most OS updates (in the Windows world at least) require a restart is that you get a bunch of updates to various things all at once, and this often includes some kernel updates.
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