James Sutherland <jas88@cam.ac.uk> writes:
> This is, IMHO, quite an attractive idea: a fully hot-swappable system,
> where any failed component can be replaced without any downtime.
Many big systems (historically and presently) with some degree of
hardware fault-tolerance have also provided for partitioning, either
through software, hardware, or a bit of both. One reason is that even
if you eliminate downtime due to hardware problems, you are still left
with downtime due to software; partitioning adds a lot of flexibility
in testing and deploying changes such as kernel bug fixes.
Much of the kernel support needed for hot-swappable processors and
memory is the same as the support needed to cooperate with some kind
of hypervisor layer that manages software partitioning. So rather
than putting full support for hot swappable processors and memory into
the kernel, it might be better to add minimal support to the kernel,
and then develop a separate hypervisor layer to sit underneath the
kernel.
David Wragg
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