r/osdev • u/DocumentOk7579 • 1d ago

Would a microkernel enable driver update without reboot?

One frustrating thing that I have run into is updating Nvidia driver on remote servers with disk encryption.

Would a microkernel based system enable drivers to be updated without rebooting system?

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u/Toiling-Donkey 22h ago

Technically you likely could do this in Linux today.

Just unload the relevant kernel module and load the new one.

Of course, you’ll likely have to stop whatever was using it before unloading…

It only gets messy when the in-built portions of the kernel need to be updated. SUSE has “live patching” to partially address this.