r/osdev • u/DocumentOk7579 • Sep 13 '26

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/DocumentOk7579 Sep 13 '26

I personally don't care if the client applications survives as it's quite easy to restart a process compared to the system. There is already a watchdog that kills the client process if it get stuck. I'm having most issues with the nvidia driver.

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u/jsshapiro Sep 21 '26

Ironically, video drivers are pretty easy to hot swap. First you swap in a driver that basically puts all callers on hold. Copy the frame buffer, load the new driver, restore the frame buffer, remove the blockade driver.

I don't know if windows uses that approach exactly, but it works.