KernelTrap has an article about the possibilty of performing
live kernel upgrades. Evidently the end opinion is, “It’s a lot
more complicated than it sounds.”
However, Rob Landley offers quite a bit of information on just
what is involved, “That said, the fundamental problem is that when
you change kernels, run-time state structures change. Parsing your
run-time state from oldvers to feed into newvers can’t really be
done automatically because your tool wouldn’t know what any of the
changes MEAN, so you would probably have to write a custom frozen
process converter, which would be a pain and a half to debug, to
say the least. (And by the time you’ve got that even half debugged
you need to do it for the NEXT kernel…)”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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