Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 12 Jul 2001 03:15:12 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 12 Jul 2001 03:15:02 -0400 Received: from mailout03.sul.t-online.com ([194.25.134.81]:36356 "EHLO mailout03.sul.t-online.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 12 Jul 2001 03:14:55 -0400 Date: 12 Jul 2001 09:23:00 +0200 From: kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <84jaVrwXw-B@khms.westfalen.de> In-Reply-To: Subject: Re: Switching Kernels without Rebooting? X-Mailer: CrossPoint v3.12d.kh7 R/C435 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Organisation? Me?! Are you kidding? In-Reply-To:

X-No-Junk-Mail: I do not want to get *any* junk mail. Comment: Unsolicited commercial mail will incur an US$100 handling fee per received mail. X-Fix-Your-Modem: +++ATS2=255&WO1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org riel@conectiva.com.br (Rik van Riel) wrote on 11.07.01 in : > One thing which always surprises me in this discussion > (it comes up about once a year, it seems) is that > nobody participating in this discussion ever starts > writing any code for it. > > Is this a feature which is only wanted by people who > don't want to code, or is this just a signal that the > amount of trouble involved just isn't worth it? Maybe it's a sign that the people who *would* be able to contribute have all looked at the problem already (surely most people are annoyed how a reboot interrupts everything), and have already concluded for themselves that it's not possible with reasonable effort ... but there is a steady influx of new people who don't understand enough of the problem and have to ask. What I'd *really* like (but don't see how to get there) would be a "save system state, shutdown, change kernel and/or hardware, reboot, restore state" system (where state is like "I'm logged in on this console, in this current directory, and under X I have Netscape running and this page displayed" but I don't care about the exact state of Squid or even if my ISDN line is dialled in, because those "fix themselves"). I suspect to do this right would need a means of storing per-process state controlled by the process (because only that process knows what needs to be saved, and what can easily be reconstructed - for example, open file descriptors to a place where we store cookies don't need to be saved, just routinely reopened), and then every user-visible non-transient program needs to implement it - and I don't see *that* happen in the next ten years. But it *does* have the advantage of not needing to save kernel-internal state. MfG Kai - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/