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Linux goes a long way towards updating while running. In fact, in my seven years of administering Linux – and my distro updates once a week – I never had to reb

Linux goes a long way towards updating while running. In fact, in my seven years of administering Linux – and my distro updates once a week – I never had to reboot to continue an update. Every update - during and after - I could continue using my system exactly as I was using it before. Enterprise Linux also has the feature of updating the kernel on-the-fly. The infrastructure for it has been open-source, and anyone could build a similar service for themselves if they wanted.

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lstamour 11y ago
I'm pretty sure I've updated the kernel on the fly when trying to update the kernel on Digital Ocean-- the stock kernel loads (let's call it the bootstrap kernel) and then it eventually calls some code that replaces the running kernel with a newer more modern version. I've forgotten the details, as it sounded kludgy, but I'm pretty use like anything else Linux, a reboot isn't always required. In fact, with Nano server, Microsoft is trying to go that direction too -- the less you have running, the easier to avoid reboots. But the real solution is trying to be reboot-tolerant by having a slight bit of redundancy, I would think. Uptime matters more for pet/snowflake servers than for cattle....
- pritambaral 11y ago
  > I'm pretty sure I've updated the kernel on the fly when trying to update the kernel on Digital Ocean What you go on to describe sounds a lot like kexec, and a kexec is the same thing as a reboot for everything on a computer except the hardware. The new kernel during a kexec starts with a freshly-booted state. What I meant was – and perhaps I wasn't clear enough – updating the kernel in-memory, while it runs so that even your userspace apps notice nothing - except perhaps a few fractions of seconds of time slipping by - and continue running while the kernel they're running on top of is patched with new code. This has been possible for a while on Linux. It began with, IIRC, Ksplice as a college-project, then a startup, then bought-out by Oracle for Oracle Linux, then independent efforts at similar implementations by both Red Hat and Suse, which eventually got merged together and mainlined into Linus's tree.

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lstamour 11y ago

I'm pretty sure I've updated the kernel on the fly when trying to update the kernel on Digital Ocean-- the stock kernel loads (let's call it the bootstrap kernel) and then it eventually calls some code that replaces the running kernel with a newer more modern version. I've forgotten the details, as it sounded kludgy, but I'm pretty use like anything else Linux, a reboot isn't always required. In fact, with Nano server, Microsoft is trying to go that direction too -- the less you have running, the easier to avoid reboots. But the real solution is trying to be reboot-tolerant by having a slight bit of redundancy, I would think. Uptime matters more for pet/snowflake servers than for cattle....

pritambaral 11y ago
> I'm pretty sure I've updated the kernel on the fly when trying to update the kernel on Digital Ocean What you go on to describe sounds a lot like kexec, and a kexec is the same thing as a reboot for everything on a computer except the hardware. The new kernel during a kexec starts with a freshly-booted state. What I meant was – and perhaps I wasn't clear enough – updating the kernel in-memory, while it runs so that even your userspace apps notice nothing - except perhaps a few fractions of seconds of time slipping by - and continue running while the kernel they're running on top of is patched with new code. This has been possible for a while on Linux. It began with, IIRC, Ksplice as a college-project, then a startup, then bought-out by Oracle for Oracle Linux, then independent efforts at similar implementations by both Red Hat and Suse, which eventually got merged together and mainlined into Linus's tree.