We’ve heard before that Windows 11 might get a “hot-patching” feature with version 24H2, coming later this year, that will allow (some) future Cumulative Updates to no longer require a reboot. And we just got another hint that this might become a reality.
Windows Latest reports that PhantomOfEarth has reported a new support article for hot-patching in Windows 11 on X, though there’s a catch: it was apparently published by mistake and quickly removed by Microsoft.
The message can still be viewed via the Wayback Machine But if you look closely, you’ll see that the article is merely a copy and paste of the guidelines for writing a support document (which, as mentioned, was clearly published by accident).
The key point here is that Microsoft is working on content in the background about hot-patching for Windows Ge or Germanium – which is Windows 11 24H2, with Germanium being the codename of the new platform it’s built on – is a heavy hint that this is indeed inbound. If not, then why even bother working on material related to hot-patching at this point?
A seamless way to update Windows 11
Given the date mentioned in the now-retracted article, which is 2024.08, this suggests that we could potentially expect an update from Microsoft regarding the hot patch functionality for Windows 11 before the end of August.
Of course, this could all still come to nothing, but this does appear to be a feature that Microsoft is planning, according to previous information from Zac Bowden, a reliable leaker on all things Windows.
Bowden did indeed claim that it’s planned for the 24H2 update, and he explained a bit more about how hot-patching would work in an info dump earlier this year. The long and short of it is that only a few cumulative updates (the monthly patches that arrive for Windows 11) would be applied without a reboot – two in a row – before the third cumulative base update rolls out that does require a reboot. That means two-thirds of the updates would be hot-patched, though keep in mind that the big yearly updates for Windows 11 – like 24H2 – will always require a reboot, since they are naturally much larger in size.
It would be great if we could seamlessly download and install a bunch of monthly Windows 11 patches on our PCs without having to reboot them, so we could just keep working (or gaming, or whatever we were doing).
It will also remove that tiny bit of danger that comes with rebooting a desktop PC for an update, praying that there’s no power outage. If your PC shuts down during an update of any kind, that can be bad news, and could result in corrupted files – and maybe even the operating system not booting at all, if you’re really unlucky.