On Friday 11 December 2009 21:00:49 Dale wrote: > Alan McKinnon wrote: > > On Friday 11 December 2009 17:07:17 Dale wrote:
> >> I have also wondered why a person would go to all that trouble. > >> Wouldn't all the services have to be restarted anyway? > > > > Nope. userspace ABI is stable so services just carry on as normal once he > > new kernel comes up. You don't need to restart SeaMonkey if you restart a > > local apache on your machine - same thing > > That would be cool of you had a system that just couldn't be rebooted. > Is there such a thing tho? What would be the reason a machine just > could not be rebooted? I guess one would be if the puter was on planet > Mars maybe? Is that how NASA does it? lol Could you imagine getting a > blue screen of death on a computer that is on Mars? O_O IBM mainframes many years ago could be rebooted. I mean rebooting was physically not supported; there wasn't even an on/off switch. There was a guillotine blade around the incoming mains feed attached to an explosive bolt and only supposed to be activated by the building's Fireman's Switch :-) Mars probes can be rebooted, but the underlying BIOS-type code cannot, and it has all kinds of fail-safe routines built in, if code doesn't work it reverts back to the last known good version. Much like today's smartphones which is the prime reason why it's normally insanely hard to permanently brick them. But all that really does is move the "you can't ever halt this code" section one level lower -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
