Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 09:27:08AM -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> As with a current LiveOS installation, the installation media kernel is  
> the running kernel.  Even if the f11 installer already allows you to  
> trigger a chrooted yum update as part of the install, you won't be  
> running the updated kernel until after a reboot.

Is it the case that the installation kernel is always UP,
whereas the real kernel would probably be SMP nowadays?

> ... Same as RebootlessInstaller ... until ksplice ...

I don't think ksplice changes things -- it seems to only work for very
minor kernel patches.  For example, any change to the layout of a
kernel structure would appear to be incompatible with ksplice.  Thus
it seems highly unlikely it'll ever work in its current form for
arbitrary kernel revisions.

<quote>
  Before you use ksplice-create on a patch, you should confirm that the
  desired source code change does not make any semantic changes to
  kernel data structures--that is, changes that would require existing
  instances of kernel data structures to be transformed (e.g., a patch
  that adds a field to a global data structure would require the
  existing data structures to change).  If you use Ksplice on a patch
  that changes data structure semantics, Ksplice will not detect the
  problem and you could experience kernel problems as a result.
</quote>
from: http://www.ksplice.com/doc/ksplice-create

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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