Switching device drivers without rebooting

Posted Oct 11, 2009 21:35 UTC (Sun) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: Infrastructure unification in the block layer by neilbrown
Parent article: Infrastructure unification in the block layer

This is wanted (but not implemented AFAIK) for virtualization. The idea is that the guest is running, say, an emulated IDE or SCSI device, and then you install virtio drivers which somehow transparently take over the existing device.

Such a feature is common already in commercial hypervisors (eg. VMWare tools does it).

Rich.