I noticed from other posts that /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs tells what package is requiring a reboot, but this file does not exist anymore.

I have been running Ubuntu 13.10 (and updated to beta 14.04) and realized that my laptop has not asked me for a reboot once. That may be because I reboot it a few times a week already, but it has never even asked.

Back in the day, maybe around Ubuntu 10.04 I remember very vividly the red gear on the top right of gnome/unity requesting reboot, but this no longer happens.

Did the kernel update to not require these reboots anymore? How would that work?