Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 21 Jul 1999 16:54:29 +0000 | From | Bernd Paysan <> | Subject | Re: Hot-swappable kernels? |
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Martin Ranang Thorsen wrote: > With the awareness that I now might make a complete fool of myself, I > still want to ask some questions, with the hope of getting > enlightened. I've been looking for the answers to this topic for some > time now, but I've found none yet.
There has been a discussion in comp.arch about making operating systems hot-swappable. This does require deep design changes and it's very unlikely that Linux will make these design changes just for being hot-swappable. There are swappable parts in the kernel (modules), but they all require to take that specific service down before swap.
The basic issue is that all kernel services must be state-less. Since a lot of current OS services are all but stateless, they have to be rewritten to store the state somewhere else. Basically, whenever possible, move state to the application. When not possible (security concerns, or performance problems), you need a self-describing persistent structure of the data. The new kernel then can figure out how to convert it to the new internal format.
Difficult? Nightmare!
-- Bernd Paysan
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