[SGVLUG] Well its fun to be scared sometimes.

Dustin laurence at alice.caltech.edu
Wed Aug 31 20:44:37 PDT 2005


On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Emerson, Tom wrote:

> hmmm^2... I know I have one system set for "automatic updates", which
> would (I presume) include kernel updates, but I suspect that unless I
> actually REBOOT, the "kernel" won't actually swap in...

No, Linux can't currently swap running kernels, though I believe this
capability just made it in to the last kernel.org release or is about to.

Whether a reboot would swap it in depends on how the suse installer
fiddles with the boot loader.  Since it's probably grub, I guess to swap
in it would either have to re-write menu.lst to boot into the last
installed kernel (dangerous IMO) or name the new one the same as the old
one (possibly losing the old one, even more dangerous) so grub finds it
(hmm, but grub may remember actual disk locations).

Dustin



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