Re: live kernel upgrades (was: live kernel patching design)

Ingo Molnar
2015-02-24T09:16:30Z

* Arjan van de Ven <arjanvandeven@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think 10 seconds is Ingo being a bit exaggerating,
> since you can boot a full system in a lot less time than
> that, and more so if you know more about the system (e.g.
> don't need to spin down and then discover and spin up
> disks). If you're talking about inside a VM it's even
> more extreme than that.

Correct, I mentioned 10 seconds latency to be on the safe
side - but in general I suspect it can be reduced to below
1 second, which should be enough for everyone but the most
specialized cases: even specialized HA servers will update
their systems in low activity maintenance windows.

and we don't design the Linux kernel for weird, extreme
cases, we design for the common, sane case that has the
broadest appeal, and we hope that the feature garners
enough interest to be maintainable.

This is not a problem in general: the weird case can take
care of itself just fine - 'specialized and weird' usually
means there's enough money to throw at special hardware and
human solutions or it goes extinct quickly ...

Thanks,

Ingo