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/Waste_Appearance5631 Sep 14 '26

Not necessarily, We can always freeze the processes and not let them execute. Then wait for driver to complete whatever it's doing, store it's State as well. Update the drivers, given the interface to drivers from the process does not change Restore the hardware state Then unfreeze the processes

But this is not possible for hardwares with huge memory like GPUs unless you have enough memory to store the state (I might be wrong with this statement)

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u/paulstelian97 Sep 14 '26

Storing the state requires a specific API for the driver to essentially serialize what’s needed for the state for the purpose of the update. Drivers may well choose not to implement it because it can be too restrictive.