Upgrading Red Hat (Alpha & Intel) w/o rebooting

[Philip E. Varner]

> In general, how would Debian/FreeBSD get around getting the
> new kernel running without a reboot? Also, updates to things
> like libc are problematic without rebooting.

The problem was not rebooting itself.  The problem is rebooting _with a
floppy disk_, as is required by Red Hat's installer.  If the floppy drive
is broken, this won't work.  Debian has apt and FreeBSD has their
{wonderful,horrible} ports collection, so you can upgrade versions (as in
Debian 2.1 to Debian 2.2, not as in just kernel versions) without having
to reboot onto a floppy.  

I'm pretty sure that just running "rpm -F *.rpm" on the latest set of RPMS
isn't the same as using RH's installer.  Else, they would just state that
somewhere in their literature.  Does anybody have any evidence to the
contrary? 

> Are you sure the floppies are broken or did the kernel not
> test for it correctly? There were bugs in the Alpha floppy
> code where the floppy is not correctly initialized. A patch
> was posted a while back on axp-list.

No, the floppies are physically broken.  They used to work and now they
don't.  

_P



> 
> 
> Wes
> 
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