longest uptime

Erik Nørgaard norgaard at locolomo.org
Sat May 7 06:31:37 PDT 2005


Stevan Tiefert wrote:
> if I want to do a uptime-record I have always the possiblity to shut 
> down daemons (when needed) and start them again, without rebooting the 
> system! That is very nice! I had many days and weeks running my nicely 
> freebsd-server. BUT every time I updated the patchlevel (in example 
> 5.2.1-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE-p14) I had to reboot my system. But then 
> the counter of uptime is starting at zero again :-(
> 
> Question: Is there a possiblity to run the system inclusive patching it, 
> without rebooting? Goal is to run a system maybe longer than a year!!!

If the patches are applied to a loadable kernel module only, then it 
should (at least in theory) be enough to rebuild/install the kernel as 
usual and then just reload the kernel module instead of rebooting. 
Reloading the module requires that the given service is not in use, 
which is why it may be easier to just reboot.

Taking this idea to the extreme, there is a number of other projects, 
non-FBSD, that work on micro/nanokernel technology. I can't recommend 
you one over another - I haven't tried them - QNX is a commercial 
product, also there is open-source LSE/OS, just to get you started.

Cheers, Erik
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