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Thursday, June 8, 2006
Why oh why must I reboot my Mac for a stinking install of QuickTime? Why must I reboot for anything at all? This is UNIX people? You don’t have to reboot in UNIX. Ever hear of the command “kill -HUP”?
Ever since I started using OS X four years ago, I always scratched my head to certain applications being updated that informed me that it would require a reboot when done upgrading. Having worked on SunOS, Solaris, and IRIX for some time, I never had the same requests when I did updates on those machines. Wayne Fiori, manager of technical services at INACT Health Management Systems, got that when he told Jim Carr of the MicroTimes that he went UNIX instead of NT because he wouldn’t have always reboot. But anything that needs hardware access is a problem, one might say, like my QuickTime example. Well, not necessarily true, according to Nicholas Petreley.
Some versions of UNIX (Linux, for example) support loadable device modules. This means you can boot Linux and reconfigure its support for hardware and software on the fly. For example, you can boot Linux without support for the SCSI card you have installed. You simply load support for that SCSI card when you need to access one or more of the SCSI-connected devices, such as an optical disk for backup. You can unload the SCSI driver when you’re finished. You can also freely load and unload support for sound cards, network cards — even file systems such as HPFS, FAT, VFAT, and others (an NTFS driver is in the works).
This is not a new complaint and yet one that goes unanswered by Apple. You can find many blogs, forum posts, and magazine articles discussing this problem. As to why this annoying feature of OS X goes on unchanged, the coveted answer goes unknown like the mystery of why HP told Woz that it didn’t want to make PCs when he brought to them the Apple I idea. Maybe Leopard will have this fixed, but don’t hold your breath.
We at SvenOnTech would love to see the ability to just upgrade without a reboot but since that isn’t going to happen, at least we are thankful for quicker boot times than we get on our Windows XP Professional desktop. Wow, if we had to reboot for everything on that, we’d for sure throw that out the windows (bad pun intended.)
June 8th, 2006 at 10:53
Using HUP reloads a process but not all processes behave predictably when they’re reloaded.
I think given the state of flux of multitasking system, it’s much simpler to reboot than to sort out all the dependencies that could exist.
I know from experience that some devices may be loaded that would prevent file system processes from reloading properly. It could be worked out but rebooting is usually the fastest way to regain sanity.
In the case of Quicktime, the Finder seems dependent on it (at least from the playable thumbnails I can see when I browse my drive). I think relaunching the Finder would be necessary at minimum. But there could be other dependecies that make rebooting the easier option.
June 8th, 2006 at 11:06
It’s because Apple is lazy. QuickTime is used at the core of A LOT of things. They probably figure they would have to bounce so many applications to get them to use the new code that it’s simpler just to restart. Heck, I’d be happier with a logout but again, what to do about the other active users (fast usersw)…
June 8th, 2006 at 11:26
Probably has to do with the objective-c runtime’s inability to unload a shared library (e.g., bundle) once it’s been loaded. I have a feeling apple will eventually get around to addressing that, because lord knows it’d be nice to unload a plug-in as easily as you can load it.
June 8th, 2006 at 11:48
I just use Force Quit on the sotfware updater after installation, when it won’t let you quit w/o forcing a restart. I do this all the time.
June 8th, 2006 at 14:51
jhg (#1) has it.
Other dependencies make it the easiest option (at least right now)
Another question: Why must you whine like a little girl and feel that’s blog worthy?
June 8th, 2006 at 15:14
jhg, I only “whine” because I’ve seen it not necessary elsewhere. OSX is the best desktop operating system in the world and it’s always been a wonder to me why Apple dings it with this annoyance. That’s why I found it worthy of a blog entry. Since others have debated this problem long before me, I would have to say that there a lot of us girls in this world.
June 8th, 2006 at 16:19
I don’t mind having to restart… after all, restarting every once in a while cleans out the ‘cobwebs’ and updates are about the only time I do that anymore.
June 9th, 2006 at 3:22
I have no knowledge of the inner workings of OSX so I just do what Apple recommends because I figure that they do know what is necessary. In addition to this I always repair permissions after any software installation that requires me to enter my login password. My theory here, right or wrong, is that if it wants my password it is probably doing something in one of the Libraries and might stuff up permissions somewhere. Continuing the theory, the few minutes a reboot and permisssion repair take might save me a lot of hassles later.
The only time I have had to reboot in the last eight months or so have been for software installs so I dont find it much of a bugbear.