From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3BB0AF37.A2041B64@chinook.com> Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 12:22:15 -0400 From: Peter Desnoyers MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Grant Erickson Cc: linuxppc-embedded@lists.linuxppc.org Subject: Re: Solutions for Fast Software Upgrade in Linux/PPC References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-linuxppc-embedded@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: I would give some serious thought to the fast reboot idea. [a related anecdote - a former colleague who worked for Caymam back in the days when people bought Appletalk routers complained how they were perceived as much less reliable than the Shiva product, even though the Shiva crashed much more frequently. It turns out that the Shiva rebooted faster than the AppleTalk timeout, while the Cayman box didn't...] You can probably separate it into two halves, kernel and application. I can boot a 50MHz MBX860 up to /sbin/init in 6 seconds with an NFS root, so I think 1 or 2 second kernel boot is quite feasible on a faster machine with data in flash or (already spun up) local disk. (PCI scanning will take time, but you should be able to trim it significantly with knowledge of your hardware) Application startup depends. You might investigate having all your applications use a "checkpoint" or "pre-digested" format for their configuration files, so that they can load config quickly at boot, and save configuration before reboot. This includes whatever application is going to configure the kernel after boot, which I assume won't be init+init.d/network+ifconfig etc. -- ..................................................................... Peter Desnoyers (781) 457-1165 pdesnoyers@chinook.com Chinook Communications (617) 661-1979 pjd@fred.cambridge.ma.us 100 Hayden Ave, Lexington MA 02421 ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/