Reboots Are for Hardware: Challenges and Solutions to Updating an Operating System on the Fly

Patches to modern operating systems, including bug fixes and security updates, and the reboots and downtime they require, cause tremendous problems for system users and administrators. Dynamic update allows an operating system to be patched without the need for a reboot or other service interruption. We have taken the approach of building dynamic update functionality directly into an existing operating system, K42. To determine the applicability of our update system, and to investigate the changes that are made to OS code, we analysed K42’s revision history. The analysis showed that our original system could only support half of the desired changes to K42. The main problem preventing more changes from being converted to dynamic updates was our system’s inability to update interfaces. Other studies, as well as our own investigations, have shown that change to interfaces is also prevalent in systems such as Linux. Thus, it is apparent that a dynamic update mechanism needs to handle...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: Andrew Baumann, Jonathan Appavoo, Robert W. Wisniewski, Dilma Da Silva, Orran Krieger, Gernot Heiser
• Keywords: Dynamic Update, Interface Changes, Operating System, USENIX 2007