> rebooting is short hand for stopping to run the old kernel, > and running a (potentially different) kernel on restart. > > By definition, when you upgrade kernels, that process is > called rebooting. Still, I think it may be theoretically possible. The kernel just resides in a chunk of memory -- it could be smart enough to just swap out the old code and swap in the new code bit by bit. (of course there would have to be mechanisms for cleanly shutting down/re-initializing modules and shuffling around data structures when needed -- it would need something like an in-process dpkg with postinst/prerm procs) I'd bet Linux will be the first to implement this. :-) Cheers, - Jim
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