Morgan - Ports and Kernel

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the great podcast. I look forward to new episodes every week and am almost done listening to your whole back catalog.

I'm pretty new to the BSDs. I have run an OpenBSD router (using the info from your tutorial) for almost a year and recently started hosting my wife's blog on a spare PC using FreeBSD.

I've heard you mention several times that the ports tree can be compiled against any currently-supported version of FreeBSD. But I recently found a page on FreeBSD.org which says: "The Ports Collection supports the latest release on the FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD-STABLE branches. Older releases are not supported and may or may not work correctly with an up-to-date ports collection." (https://www.freebsd.org/ports/)

I'm currently running 10.3-RELEASE and plan to upgrade to each new -RELEASE as it becomes available but running -CURRENT or -STABLE is a little too bleeding edge for my present level of expertise. I'm worried that I'll not be able to install certain ports (or the packages compiled from them) because even the most recent -RELEASE may be out of date. What am I missing?

My second question applies to the BSDs in general. When I upgrade or patch the kernel, I know that a reboot is required to load the new one. But I don't understand how to ensure that upgrades to other parts of the base system (or to installed packages) are actually applied to a running system after installation.

The resources I've found all give vague instructions to "restart affected userland processes" after an update. Sometimes that's easy. If ntpd gets updated, I just restart the service. But other times it isn't apparent to me which processes have been impacted, especially when the update is to a dependency or to a part of the system I don't recognize.

To be safe, I usually just reboot after any base or package update but I know that's overkill and it leads to unnecessary downtime. What is the proper approach to this?

Thanks for making such a great show,
Morgan