I've seen a thread on this matter but the underlying mechanisms are still not clear. Suppose I've done a minor upgrade to dovecot using portmaster while dovecot was running in the background. What happens then? Does it care if its binary had been modified and if yes, why exactly? Or does it load itself completely into memory upon startup and whether or not I modify a binary after that just doesn't matter? I know folks recommend restarting the service or the server itself after such upgrades, but I'd also like to understand what's happening on an OS level when binaries are modified.
Second, I've seen dovecot and postfix misbehaving after upgrades performed in such fashion, even minor ones, so there's some potential for data loss, but I have never seen an official recommendation to stop a daemon before performing its upgrade.
Second, I've seen dovecot and postfix misbehaving after upgrades performed in such fashion, even minor ones, so there's some potential for data loss, but I have never seen an official recommendation to stop a daemon before performing its upgrade.