Messages in this thread | | | From | "Michael S. Zick" <> | Subject | Re: kernel upgrade on the fly | Date | Wed, 19 Jun 2002 00:09:32 -0500 |
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On Tuesday 18 June 2002 02:37 pm, Rob Landley wrote: > On Tuesday 18 June 2002 05:21 pm, zaimi@pegasus.rutgers.edu wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > has anybody worked or thought about a property to upgrade the kernel > > while the system is running? ie. with all processes waiting in their > > queues while the resident-older kernel gets replaced by a newer one. > > > Would anybody else think this to be an interesting property to have for > > the linux kernel or care to comment on this idea? > > Sure, I know two industries that do such a thing (almost); Spacecraft and the Telephone Company (any/all);
I did say almost... I'll speak of the telephone industry, because I am more familar with it... There they use two (or more) machines, running near the same program... The one connected to the outside world of hardware is duplicating the event in a message, sent to the second... The second, instead of listening to the outside world is listening to the messages, duplicating all of the program logic except the hardware i/o. The memory data structures are identical between the two. When disaster happens... Machine two rolls out it's listening modules, rolls in the i/o modules, sends signal to hardware buss switch to give it the system buss. Then the fun begins... Recover the hardware (or at least the billing information). Note the three points above: 1) Near identical programs 2) Identical data structures 3) Two sets of CPU hardware
Switching from linux-2.4.x to linux-2.6.x doesn't qualify;
The person who asked this question wants to do it on a single machine - The price just went way up...
Linux uses internal data structures when and wherever they are needed. Updating them all to be consistant would be a real b.... Probably you would have to start from scratch and rebuild them...
Hmm, I think I just said "reboot" the machine with the new kernel.
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