On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Bruce Guenter wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 03, 2000 at 02:29:34PM +0100, James Sutherland wrote:
> > This is, IMHO, quite an attractive idea: a fully hot-swappable system,
> > where any failed component can be replaced without any downtime.
>
> And how do you plan on swapping out the motherboard that everything
> connects into?
Every "component" is mounted on a carrier board; this then connects to a
pair of backplanes. Each individual component can, obviously, be replaced;
you can also remove/disable one backplane at once without downtime.
The next issue is to enable software upgrades without downtime. For
applications, this can be done by installing the new version, then
signalling the old version to "exec" the new one. (Apache can do something
similar with configuration files already.) For a WWW server, for example,
this can be done without dropping or refusing a single connection.
The kernel itself would be harder, of course. Kernel modules could do
something similar - just unload the old one and reload the new one, taking
care to avoid anything trying to use the module in the mean time - leaving
just the core code - memory management etc., which would be much more
difficult.
James.
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