>Quoth Brandorr on Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 11:04:42AM -0400: >> I remember hearing noise, a few years back, about Sun working on the >> ability to patch running systems, such that the patching would not >> require any downtime. (IE: No reboot required for the patches to go >> into affect. This included if I recall kernel patches.) >> >> Is my memory faulty? Was this every in the works? If so, what is the status? > >Last year an intern made a prototype which could restart userland, which >would allow patches to be put into effect without POSTing. It wasn't >product-ready and I don't recall it being discussed outside of Sun. It >wouldn't allow for kernel patches anyway. For those the only thing >I can think of is a paper I saw at Usenix a few years ago. It might >have been from IBM.
There was a different "hotpatching" technology we developed which would alllow hot patching running systems; but even though the mechanism was created, no such patches were ever released. If you restart userland, then it is not unlikely that you can also unload a few modules (such as NFS, all non root fs modules, device drivers for devices not used until userland starts) Casper
