this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Aren't there distros that treat the kernal like anyother package and can hot swap it?

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you can't really hot swap the kernel, because all of the system runs on it.

you'd need to stop the system (you can save its state and recover where you left), reboot to load the new kernel and let it take control.

however, there are some distros and programs that allow you to hot swap certain parts of the kernel (mainly drivers) without rebooting. Note that, even though the system doesn't reboot, most packages still need to be restarted for them to pick up the new driver.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Not quite like that but there is a thing called live patching that some distros offer. It's mainly to used fix security issues rather than a typical update

Ubuntu livepatching and kpatch are some different tools out there for that if you want to look into it