Is it important to reboot Linux after a kernel update?

Posted by lfaraone on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by lfaraone
Published on 2009-05-19T21:03:48Z Indexed on 2014/05/27 9:31 UTC
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kernel

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updates

I have a few production Fedora and Debian webservers that host our sites as well as user shell accounts (used for git vcs work, some screen+irssi sessions, etc).

Occasionally a new kernel update will come down the pipeline in yum/apt-get, and I was wondering if most of the fixes are severe enough to warrant a reboot, or if I can apply the fixes sans reboot.

Our main development server currently has 213 days of uptime, and I wasn't sure if it was insecure to run such an older kernel.

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