There has long been talk of cutting the necessity of restarting for smaller, but important, updates.
Borrows Server and Xbox technology
We don't have the option on mobiles, and Windows has always had the problem - it's probably only Linux that is modular enough to get away with it in many cases. But now it may look like Microsoft has come further. It is, again, Windows Central that reveals the big improvement which means that you will not have to reboot every time Microsoft releases the monthly security updates.
Internally, the company refers to the technology as "hot patching," a technique they already use in Windows Server and Xbox. The improvement was discovered by the Windows newspaper in dev test version 26058 and the feature that needs to be enabled is “Virtualization-Based Security.”
The hope is that this will be baked into 24H2
Microsoft describes that the technology can "update the in-memory code of running processes without having to restart the process." As Windows Central points out, this doesn't mean you'll never have to reboot: you'll have to reboot after installing basic platform updates like security updates that this builds on, but you'll drop security updates that don't have to make extensive code changes:
"This means that in an ideal world, only four monthly security updates would require reboots a year, they are in January, April, July, and October," writes Windows Central. According to sources who have spoken to them, Microsoft hopes to have the feature ready with Windows 11 24H2 launching later this summer – support for ARM devices will come next year if all goes according to plan.