[Bug 1747499] Re: 98-reboot-required and Interaction with livepatch

[Christian Reis]

Actually, I think there's more to it. Here are some thoughts

1. The compelling use case for livepatch is in fact to minimize and
control the need to reboot; this is what customers pay us for. For many
of them, rebooting every 3 weeks is either impossible or at least very
painful. Let's not lose sight of that.

2. The output of canonical-livepatch status clearly says when you are up
to date and when a reboot is required. In other words, the client does
know when all patches are applied, and alternatively, when it is time to
reboot.

3. Every external tool we've had customers ask us (AWS Patch Manager,
Azure Patch Management) looks at /var/run/reboot-required and uses that
to decide whether to reboot or not.

The net effect of #3 is that canonical-livepatch is rendered useless,
basically, because every 3 weeks everything needs to be rebooted. And
it's a critical use case, so we do need to address this in order to
retain value in the proposition.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to update-notifier in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1747499

Title:
  98-reboot-required and Interaction with livepatch

Status in update-notifier package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  If a system is using canonical livepatch, has it enabled, and patches
  are applied, it could be confusing for a user to receive a "system
  restart required" messages in the MOTD when logging in.

  That message, when present, is printed by 98-reboot-required which
  essentially just cats /var/run/reboot-required to stdout. That file is
  placed by packages that require a reboot so that they are properly
  used in their updated versions. Examples that come to mind are libc
  and the kernel.

  There is a secondary file that can be created which says which
  packages requested the reboot. That would be /var/run/reboot-
  required.pkgs

  Ideally that script should not print out the reboot required message
  if a) livepatch is installed and enabled; b) the only trigger for the
  reboot is a kernel update.

  For (a), one can use the command "ubuntu-advantage is-livepatch-
  enabled" and check $?. That is in the ubuntu-advantage-tools package.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/1747499/+subscriptions