3 ms·

This is the key. Lots of systems have seamless updates where the only real interruption is a reboot. Android does an A/B update and after a only slightly slow

This is the key. Lots of systems have seamless updates where the only real interruption is a reboot. Android does an A/B update and after a only slightly slow reboot is in the new version. It then does some optimization in the background that can have a slight performance impact. NixOS must be the gold standard here. It downloads and completely installs the new version in the background then a regular-speed reboot is enough to be running the new system. (~10s on my system) But Windows and macOS both have crazy slow update processes. When I had a mac for work I was dumbfounded by how slow the update process was. It regularly took >30min! Those machines are crazy fast, it seems like it could have written a TiB of data in that time so IDK what it is actually doing.

atonse 4y ago
100% agree with this. Point updates of macOS take 20+ minutes on an M1 Max with 32GB of memory and a blazing fast SSD. What could it possibly be doing? Even iOS updates are a bit faster. Is apple even interested in fixing this?
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > What could it possibly be doing? If memory serves: point-symbol optimizations to make code calls into The objective-C libraries performant. Under The hood, objective-C really does use strings to reference library functions. So when the OS is updated, the string interning table is updated and all of the installed software has to have its string to symbol caches rewritten to account for the new API. There are almost certainly better ways to do this but if I understand correctly, Apple inherited the existing solution without putting enough thought into how it would scale and now changing the solution would break an indeterminate amount of software depending upon the current implementation.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    No, installed software is not patched on updates.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Not "installed software patched;" caches rebuilt.
      - saagarjha 4y ago
        They come from Apple on a signed system image that cannot be modified.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        Sorry, can you clarify? What is the "they" in that sentence? EDIT: a sibling comment jogged my memory; the thing I was doing a bad job of remembering was prebinding. https://opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-622.5.1/RelNotes/Prebinding.html https://opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-622.5.1/... When a new version of the OS is installed, the OS re-runs prebinding for applications to the dynamic libraries they rely on because the dynamic libraries may have changed. The alternative is to have a big latency bump every time an app is launched for the first time as the caches are rebuilt on-the-fly. (I think this is the step that used to be called "Making Your Macintosh Happy" during an install, but the veracity of that notion has fallen too far down the Google search hole for me to easily pull up a reference to confirm or deny it).
        plorkyeran 4y ago
        That's no longer done on install. The modern equivalent of it is part of the signed image that you download from Apple.
  - batman-farts 4y ago
    Yes, it’s been like this since the 10.0/public beta days at least. I remember wondering about it back then. I believe the command the system updater always runs is something like update_prebinding -root /
  - atonse 4y ago
    And they can’t precompute those caches for particular libraries and ISA combinations? They know exactly what hardware it’ll run on.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Ventura improves update times to 5-10 minutes on my computer.
pooper 4y ago
I think practically all the problems with Windows will go away with one simple change. Do not ever reboot a computer without a user's consent. Any feature that requires automatic reboot should be opt-in. However, this exposes the real challenge. We cannot have informed consent without informed users. I think this problem will haunt us repeatedly in the future. We need users to know at least a little bit about their options. Only then can they make informed choices on what option to pick. This means people can't glaze over the details and not worry about them. This does not mean you have to be a computer wizard. You just need to know what you want and pick an option that is good for you. For example, I run this on Fedora: sudo dnf offline-upgrade download -y && time sudo dnf offline-upgrade reboot Any update requires a reboot. However, I am ok with it because I am positive each update comes after a lot of testing. More importantly, I am in control of when to run this update. I can't accidentally run it because it requires my sudo password. I used to wonder why no corporation complains about Windows Update. Then I learned that virtually all companies use group policy to change Windows Update behavior to suit their organization. Therefore, this is a non-issue for them. Welp.
- hinkley 4y ago
  > Do not ever reboot a computer without a user's consent. That also includes never crashing, which Microsoft has historically struggled with. If you don’t reboot in an orderly way, then the machine crashes while the user is doing something, and when it restarts everything is different. “Don’t restart” is insufficient for good UX here.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  The problem here is that a modern OS should only need to be rebooted when the kernel is updated, and Microsoft's security model requires updating the kernel all the time. On Linux, kernel security updates are usually, "Hey, update this when you get a chance, because a bad actor already on your system could escalate privilege in a rare scenario." With Windows, it's an almost-weekly, "Hey, update right now, because someone in another country is pwning all unpatched machines that aren't air-gapped from the internet."
  - 4y ago

atonse 4y ago

100% agree with this. Point updates of macOS take 20+ minutes on an M1 Max with 32GB of memory and a blazing fast SSD. What could it possibly be doing? Even iOS updates are a bit faster. Is apple even interested in fixing this?

shadowgovt 4y ago
> What could it possibly be doing? If memory serves: point-symbol optimizations to make code calls into The objective-C libraries performant. Under The hood, objective-C really does use strings to reference library functions. So when the OS is updated, the string interning table is updated and all of the installed software has to have its string to symbol caches rewritten to account for the new API. There are almost certainly better ways to do this but if I understand correctly, Apple inherited the existing solution without putting enough thought into how it would scale and now changing the solution would break an indeterminate amount of software depending upon the current implementation.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  No, installed software is not patched on updates.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Not "installed software patched;" caches rebuilt.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      They come from Apple on a signed system image that cannot be modified.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        Sorry, can you clarify? What is the "they" in that sentence? EDIT: a sibling comment jogged my memory; the thing I was doing a bad job of remembering was prebinding. https://opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-622.5.1/RelNotes/Prebinding.html https://opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-622.5.1/... When a new version of the OS is installed, the OS re-runs prebinding for applications to the dynamic libraries they rely on because the dynamic libraries may have changed. The alternative is to have a big latency bump every time an app is launched for the first time as the caches are rebuilt on-the-fly. (I think this is the step that used to be called "Making Your Macintosh Happy" during an install, but the veracity of that notion has fallen too far down the Google search hole for me to easily pull up a reference to confirm or deny it).
        plorkyeran 4y ago
        That's no longer done on install. The modern equivalent of it is part of the signed image that you download from Apple.
- batman-farts 4y ago
  Yes, it’s been like this since the 10.0/public beta days at least. I remember wondering about it back then. I believe the command the system updater always runs is something like update_prebinding -root /
- atonse 4y ago
  And they can’t precompute those caches for particular libraries and ISA combinations? They know exactly what hardware it’ll run on.
saagarjha 4y ago
Ventura improves update times to 5-10 minutes on my computer.

pooper 4y ago

I think practically all the problems with Windows will go away with one simple change. Do not ever reboot a computer without a user's consent. Any feature that requires automatic reboot should be opt-in. However, this exposes the real challenge. We cannot have informed consent without informed users. I think this problem will haunt us repeatedly in the future. We need users to know at least a little bit about their options. Only then can they make informed choices on what option to pick. This means people can't glaze over the details and not worry about them. This does not mean you have to be a computer wizard. You just need to know what you want and pick an option that is good for you. For example, I run this on Fedora: sudo dnf offline-upgrade download -y && time sudo dnf offline-upgrade reboot Any update requires a reboot. However, I am ok with it because I am positive each update comes after a lot of testing. More importantly, I am in control of when to run this update. I can't accidentally run it because it requires my sudo password. I used to wonder why no corporation complains about Windows Update. Then I learned that virtually all companies use group policy to change Windows Update behavior to suit their organization. Therefore, this is a non-issue for them. Welp.

hinkley 4y ago
> Do not ever reboot a computer without a user's consent. That also includes never crashing, which Microsoft has historically struggled with. If you don’t reboot in an orderly way, then the machine crashes while the user is doing something, and when it restarts everything is different. “Don’t restart” is insufficient for good UX here.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
The problem here is that a modern OS should only need to be rebooted when the kernel is updated, and Microsoft's security model requires updating the kernel all the time. On Linux, kernel security updates are usually, "Hey, update this when you get a chance, because a bad actor already on your system could escalate privilege in a rare scenario." With Windows, it's an almost-weekly, "Hey, update right now, because someone in another country is pwning all unpatched machines that aren't air-gapped from the internet."
- 4y ago