systemd

A runbook for replacing a running daemon without dropping requests, tested on a small TCP server under real systemd. A plain restart refused or reset connections every time; starting the new version beside the old one avoided refusals but still reset a connection in some runs, and a kernel setting made those resets go away; socket activation produced no errors. Also covered: draining in-flight work against TimeoutStopSec, and a release swap that checks the new version and rolls back.

A daemon that updates itself by starting a helper and restarting its own unit has a trap: the helper starts inside the service’s cgroup, and systemd kills everything in that cgroup on restart. In a throwaway systemd, a setsid’d helper vanished before its last log line, KillMode=process kept it alive but leaked it into the next instance, and systemd-run gave it its own unit. This post shows the evidence, the fix, and what I did not test.