Re: will be able to load new kernel without restarting?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de>]

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On Sun, 2003-05-04 12:00:00 -0400, rmoser <mlmoser@comcast.net>
wrote in message <200305041200000380.00B553E1@smtp.comcast.net>:
> You silly boys.  Thinking everything is impossible.  The old kernel
> is just a shadow of the new one... just a shadow............  I'll try
> spitting out a basic sketch.  This I'm sure you've done but if not,
> fix it.  I'm an idiot, so this won't work as-is.
> 
> For starters, freeze the system.  halt EVERYTHING.
> 
> Now load the new kernel.
> 
> Now you have this thing in RAM.  Fine.  It's not running but it's in
> RAM.
> 
> Start feeding data over to it.  In a manner it can understand.  You know,
> make all the modules work with a standard named stream (check the
> Advanced Tracker planning file at the very end:
> http://advancedtracker.sourceforge.net/at/__at.plan.txt
> I did copy it below, so you don't have to go there).  This is the
> hard part--Module compatibility through defined names.  This would
> bloat the kernel, so think about it and maybe you'll figure out a good
> way.

Sounds like being a nice feature (esp. for 24/7 uptime), but it also
sounds like a *lot* of bloat. You'll have to encode (and to decode) any
single bit if data. But - where to put all that? See, it you're having
some Gigabytes of ram, you probably end with > 100MB only describing all
those single pages (4..8K) of RAM. Encode that into a named stream - you
end up with > 1GB of data. Then, you also need to encode the whole state
of any drivers.

What do you do if drivers/mm/you-name-it changed and now uses different
data structures? In fact, any two choosen kernels may potentially use
different data structures. So for the newly-to-load kernel, you need
stream decoders for all possible older kernels. Bloat again.

So if I would need something like that, I think kexec is the way to go,
possibly with a second machine for failover (to even close the kexec
booting gap).

However - if you like this feature so much you'd die for: nobody stops
you to implement a proof-of-concept:)

MfG, JBG

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   Jan-Benedict Glaw       jbglaw@lug-owl.de    . +49-172-7608481
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