Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 18:35:27 +0930 (CST) From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org (Jamil J. Weatherbee) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers) Subject: Re: Hot Swappable Kernels Message-ID: <199708060905.SAA05837@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970806004529.266A-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org> from "Jamil J. Weatherbee" at "Aug 6, 97 00:56:38 am"
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Jamil J. Weatherbee writes: > > I know this may sound kind of lame: > > I was thinking last night of what would be required to have a hot > swappable kernel.. i.e. being able to compile the kernel binary (probably) > modules and then insert it into a running system while maintaining its > running status --- to my knowledge kernel recompiles are the only reason a > perfectly rebooting system needs to come down every once in a while. I suspect people are going to shoot you down in flames, and they're probably justified. But I suppose you'd like to know that I've done just that in the past, at Tandem. The operating system is a loosely coupled network, so we were able to boot one machine at a time. Despite the obvious interest of such a scheme for Tandem, and despite my extensive lobbying, it never came to anything. I can't imagine how you would start to do such a thing with UNIX. The closest you could come to it would be to split most of the kernel into LKMs, and change them. But there's a basic conflict of concept between keeping a kernel running (even if it's no longer the same kernel) and booting a kernel. Greg
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