Re: changing internal kernel system mechanism in runtime by a module patch

[Muli Ben-Yehuda <muli@il.ibm.com>]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 06:58:29AM +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

> This kind of stuff is just sick.  Better let them play with their research
> OS for this kind of thing :)

sick, research, what's the difference? :-)

> In practice any non-trivial bug fix requires
> changes to global data structures so reloading a module doesn't make
> sense.

... unless you have a mechanism (which k42 does) to interpose between
data structures and the users of said structures, which you can use to
decide when to repace them.

> And for module-specific problems you should be able to hack around using
> kprobes if you really need (but then again for a mission critical system
> you should have proper active-active failover clustering anyway)

I'm not advocating we merge this - nor have I seen the implementation
for Linux yet - no need to preemptively scorch it from orbit :-)

Cheers,
Muli