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Microsoft is switching Windows 7 and
Windows 8.1 to a cumulative update model similar to the one used by
Windows 10. The company is moving away from the individual hotfix
approach it has used thus far for those operating systems.
One of the major differences between Windows 7
and 8.1 on the one hand and Windows 10 on the other is what happens
when you run Windows Update. Microsoft's two older operating systems
usually need to fetch a handful of individual patches each month. If a
system hasn't been patched for a few months, this can require dozens of
individual fixes to be retrieved. In the case of a clean installation,
that number can reach the hundreds.
Windows 10, on the other hand, has perhaps one
or two updates released each month. A single cumulative update
incorporates not just all of the newest security and reliability fixes,
but all the older fixes from previous months, too. If a system isn't
updated for a few months or has had its operating system freshly
reinstalled, the scenario of having hundreds of individual fixes never
occurs. Windows 10 just grabs the latest cumulative update and, with
that one package, is more or less up-to-date.
The situation for Windows 7 improved a little back in May.
That's when Microsoft announced that a patch rollup containing all the
patches released after Service Pack 1 was to be released. This rollup
would cover several hundred individual updates, greatly reducing the
time taken to get a Windows 7 system up-to-date.
Today's announcement indicates that Microsoft is going to go further down this path.
October 2016's Patch Tuesday will see the
release of the first Monthly Rollup for Windows 7 and 8.1. This will be a
single package delivering all of the security and reliability
improvements released that month. Patch Tuesday will be delivered
through Windows Update (WU), Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), and
System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). Subsequent months will have
new Monthly Rollups, and these will be cumulative, incorporating the
content of all previous Monthly Rollups.
Initially, these Monthly Rollups will only
contain new patches released from October 2016 onward. Over the next
year, Microsoft says that it will extend them to go back in time, slowly
integrated all the patches released since the last "baseline." Although
not specified, this presumably means Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and
Windows 8.1 RTM.
Once the integration is complete, installing
the latest Monthly Rollup should be all that's needed to bring a Windows
7 or 8.1 system up-to-date, with a couple of exceptions: Adobe Flash
has separate patches, and so does the Windows servicing stack itself. As
such, a fresh Windows installation might need a couple of individual
patches to get the Windows Update components updated. But from then
it'll be able to fetch and install a single rollup to make it fully
patched.
Microsoft will also create security-only
updates that include all the security fixes released each month, without
any reliability or feature changes. These updates won't be cumulative.
They will only be offered via WSUS and SCCM; WU users won't see them.
What Microsoft won't
be doing after October, however, is shipping the individual hotfixes
any more. Fixes will only be available through the Monthly Rollup or
security-only update. This means that the ability to pick and choose
individual fixes to apply will be removed; they'll be distributed and
deployed as a singular all-or-nothing proposition. Microsoft argues that
this will improve patch and system reliability. The company only tests
configurations where every update is applied (with hundreds of
individual updates, it's simply not possible to test all the individual
combinations that a user might choose). This means that users and
organizations that cherrypick their updates and only install a subset of
the patches that ship each month are actually using configurations that
Microsoft itself has not tested. Combining the updates should mean that
end-user systems are closer to Microsoft's tested configurations.
The new policy should also reduce the time
Windows Update takes to run, as systems will have to be checked for the
presence of fewer patches.
Going forward there will also be an equivalent
patching regime for the .NET Framework. WU and WSUS will both
distribute a Monthly Rollup of security updates and reliability
improvements, with a security-only update offered to WSUS alone. The
corresponding server operating systems—Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows
Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2—will also move to the same
rollup model as the desktop platforms will use.
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