Discussion -- perhaps a trollette -- re: upgrades !

[Tom Horsley]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:13:49 -0400
William Case wrote:

> What are the arguments against this kind of thing?

Mostly that it is really really hard to do right and
you'd probably never get the kind of discipline and
testing require from the wild west open source
community :-).

There are systems where it is required that live
kernels be patchable with no downtime (things like
space stations and nuclear reactor controllers), but
it is fantastically complex to make work.

There are even things like kexec now that still
look like a reboot but don't go all the way down
and back up. All you have to do is figure out
how to merge the kexec technology with the
virtualization live migration technology and
migrate to a newly kexeced kernel on the same
machine :-).