Re: Switching Kernels without Rebooting?

[FORT David <epopo@onetelnet.fr>]

C. Slater wrote:

>
>>>    - Replace all saved structures
>>>
>>>what if the layout of these changes as it often does?
>>>
>>You would want to convert all structures into a neutral encoding scheme
>>that would support transferring structures across versions. BER comes to
>>mind, as it provides for an easy way to ignore stuff you don't understand
>>and support multiple versions of the same object in a single encoding.
>>
>>However, this would be a truly massive task. And the big challenge would
>>
>be
>
>>what to do when an older kernel doesn't understand something essential. It
>>could be simplified significantly by supporting live replacement only of
>>kernels of the same version, but this seems to defeat much of the purpose.
>>
>>DS
>>
>
>I don't think that it would be possible to switch kernels when one was not
>properly set up to do it, if thats what you mean. You could only switch
>between kernels that have been compiled to support live switching.
>
>I do see you'r point with the datastructures changeing. We would need to use
>some format that all properly setup kernels could understand, then we would
>only need to write enough to convert the structs to the middle format and
>back when they change. I am not familer with BER, but if it is suitable, it
>may help.
>
>Are you saying that swaping the kernels out altogether would be a massive
>task, or that saveing/restoring the datastructures would be a massive task.
>
>  Colin
>
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I remembered that this thread was longly discussed 1 or 2 years ago on 
linux-future
and came to no conclusive end.

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