This is a pretty interesting approach to replacing your own executable, though it's really akin to a spicy spawn where you (the parent) exec rather than they (t

This is a pretty interesting approach to replacing your own executable, though it's really akin to a spicy spawn where you (the parent) exec rather than they (the child) exec. Not to minimize the coolness of this approach -- it's certainly a good way to do it, and doubly so on older Unix. These days you could probably spawn your child process, test-boot it and then mmap bits of it back into your process and then unmap your old code pages once you're certain it boots. Or given how cheap cycles are, test-boot it and then throw that away and spawn the new executable if you're happy with the results.