http://lwn.net/Articles/15468/ This is a special feed containing comments posted to the individual LWN article titled "Kexec". hourly 2 http://lwn.net/Articles/15721/rss 2002-11-16T14:48:14+00:00 p9ing <i>Wow, this is the sort of thing I'm glad I subscribed to LWN for. I never would have noticed this patch if it weren't for this nice somewhat "plain-er" (to the end-user) description of it which still manages to go into a good bit of detail on what exactly it is and where it stands at the moment. Kudos to LWN for picking this one out.</i><br><br> I couldn't agree with you more. When LWN was taking their survey prior to implementing subscriptions, it was only after submitting my responses did I realize just what you said. So at the time I simply emailed them telling them that. Now I am entering my 2nd month or so of being a happy subscriber. Thanks, LWN! http://lwn.net/Articles/15525/rss 2002-11-14T09:41:48+00:00 ctg Another important usage of Kexec is in conjunction with &quot;LinuxBIOS&quot;. LinuxBIOS is perhaps slightly misnamed as it provides a very small, simple 32 bit initialisation function that does enough hardware set up to enable a &quot;payload&quot; to be loaded from flash memory and executed.<p>This payload is the bootloader proper - for example, etherboot, or a modified etherboot that can acccess hard disk drives as well as network drives.<p>Another payload would be a fairly minimal linux kernel. This kernel would be minimal to enable it to fit in the relatively small flash device found on most motherboards.<p>The minimal kernel would load and initialise the hardware. It would then use kexec to load a more full featured kernel from hard disk, network device or where ever.<p>The minimal firmware kernel would be fairly stable - i.e. you don't want to be reflashing all the time - but you might well want to change your kernel quite often (especially if doing some kernel development).<p>LinuxBIOS provides a whole host of advantages over the traditional 16 bit BIOSes - including, but not limited, allowing very large clusters of commodity PC hardware to be managed more effectively (i.e. you don't need 12,000 screens and keyboards, you can do &quot;gang&quot; updates/reconfigures etc). http://lwn.net/Articles/15514/rss 2002-11-14T05:10:26+00:00 Strike Wow, this is the sort of thing I'm glad I subscribed to LWN for. I never would have noticed this patch if it weren't for this nice somewhat &quot;plain-er&quot; (to the end-user) description of it which still manages to go into a good bit of detail on what exactly it is and where it stands at the moment. Kudos to LWN for picking this one out.<p>At any rate, this patch sounds really useful, potentially even more useful than the UML stuff which wowed me with the possibility of running a kernel in a debugger for direct debugging and whatnot (not for me, of course, but the kernel hackers out there). This has much more of a direct impact on me as an end-user, and I simply can't wait to give it a shot.