I am using Archlinux as a server for my infrastructure. Does anyone have experience with ignoring kernel upgrades on Archlinux for a while? If so, how do you decide on what kernel release you are staying? If you upgrade the kernel, have you found a way to circumvent having to restart the machine?
I already had the lts kernel ignored in the pacman.conf. Haven’t updated it since several months and everything is still working fine. The only issue that I’ve found is the dkms module for virtual box that I tried to install 2 days ago and it failed.
In any case if you really want to skip the kernel upgrades maybe a distro like hyperbola will suit you best.
About the upgrades without restart, systemd is working on user space restart which in theory will allow your server to restart with the new software without even closing the established connections. I think that you can also live patch the kernel, but I’ve never tried it.