5 Bad Reasons to Update Your Linux Kernel

The Linux Kernel is extremely stable. There is very little reason to update your kernel for stability’s sake. Yes, there are always ‘edge cases’ that affect a very tiny percentage of servers. If your servers are stable, then a kernel update is more likely to introduce new issues, making things less stable, not more.

Yes, you will update Linux device drivers, but most if not all of these updates will be for hardware that you don’t have, and for things you don’t use. Unless you are using cutting-edge hardware released in the last 6–12 months, there is little chance that any updates will significantly improve server performance or stability, especially, if your servers are already stable.

Occasionally, major updates to the kernel bring in some new functionality. Most likely, it will be years before any software on your system will start using that functionality. And it is almost never the case that it will ‘require’ that new functionality.
So, yes, you will have it, but it will have a zero positive effect on your system performance.

Linux development community spends an immense amount of time on improving Linux performance. Yet, the reality is that the Linux kernel is already very fast, and the incremental performance increases for most systems will not be noticeable. While some subsystems might see exciting improvements, overall, even major releases typically bring less than a 1% performance improvement for typical workloads, and can often result in slight performance degradation.

It is not enough to just install a new kernel. You must reboot the server for the new kernel to start operating. This means server downtime and extra work. Some servers might not “boot” up, or may take a long time to boot up due to fsck.

So, is there a good reason to update your kernel? Yes, there is: for security.

Read our most popular blog posts about live patching technology and find out how it enables your infrastructure security:

Related posts:

The research report includes specific segments by region (country), by company, by Type and by Application. This study provides information about the sales and revenue during the historic and…

Because there is something about being flexible enough to round those corners before the car flips, tips, or hits a wall and also not to feel so small. With every new day, it seems that certain…

Este projeto foi desenvolvido em duas partes, seriam a de desenvolver um novo logo e em seguida dar um novo visual para site. A empresa se trata de um fundo de investimentos multimercado em que o…