Ya, linuxbios is pretty neat. It's commonly used in clusters were it provides much better management and much faster boot up speeds. When your dealing with hundreds of nodes it's nice to be able to bring everything up in minutes vs a hour or so. Carefull with it, it replaces your BIOS completely and it wouldn't be fun if it didn't work out.
But that's not quite what I am talking about. It's related, though.
With recent Linux kernels (2.6.13 and newer) they added a new capability called 'kexec'. Kexec is designed to allow you to boot up with one operating system kernel, but then switch to a different one without rebooting. So theoreticly you should be able to eventually upgrade your kernel without rebooting.
What they would like to do is create a new style bootloader based on the Linux kernel called 'kboot'. This way you can use a minimalist linux environment with linux-based tools for accessing hardware and network resources and still then from there boot up into whatever system you'd like. The problem with lilo and grub, in this case, is that they have their own special drivers and own special environments for doing stuff and thus are limited. With kboot you can do anything that a normal linux system can do in preparing the environment for the final operating system to boot up in.
I don't know how all something like Windows would fit into all that. It's all a bit above my head.
I don't understand all of it see from the last linux symposium: https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/
specificly: https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/almesberger-reprint.pdf
Also maybe check out 'linux as a hypervisor'. A hypervisor is a sort of program or miniture environment that sits between your real operating system and the hardware for setting up a virtual environment. So instead of running a VM inside your OS like you would do with VMware workstation or Quemu or Microsoft Virtual Server.. all the operating systems would run in a VM side by side. Kinda neat idea. Stuff that IBM has been doing with their mainframes for 30 years now (no kidding). x86 is finally catching up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
So you can see how that would all tie into each other. Now new hardware allows x86 to be abstracted easier with no software emulation.. Also in the future things like a new PCIexpress extensions will allow operating systems to directly access hardware resources and still be managed by a hypervisor.. (right now with Xen/Linux your setting up hardware volumes in Linux and virtual network devices for client operating systems to use).
Also if your using shared storage and have enough RAM resources aviable you can migrate running operating systems from machine to machine with no downtime. Xen folks once setup a demo test of Linux host running a Quake3 server. While people were playing on it they migrated the OS image from one machine to another without the gaming clients even noticing it. I knew a fella that migrated a server farm from one geographical location to another to avoid the hurricaines from last year in a similar manner.
But that's not quite what I am talking about. It's related, though.
With recent Linux kernels (2.6.13 and newer) they added a new capability called 'kexec'. Kexec is designed to allow you to boot up with one operating system kernel, but then switch to a different one without rebooting. So theoreticly you should be able to eventually upgrade your kernel without rebooting.
What they would like to do is create a new style bootloader based on the Linux kernel called 'kboot'. This way you can use a minimalist linux environment with linux-based tools for accessing hardware and network resources and still then from there boot up into whatever system you'd like. The problem with lilo and grub, in this case, is that they have their own special drivers and own special environments for doing stuff and thus are limited. With kboot you can do anything that a normal linux system can do in preparing the environment for the final operating system to boot up in.
I don't know how all something like Windows would fit into all that. It's all a bit above my head.
I don't understand all of it see from the last linux symposium: https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/
specificly: https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/almesberger-reprint.pdf
Also maybe check out 'linux as a hypervisor'. A hypervisor is a sort of program or miniture environment that sits between your real operating system and the hardware for setting up a virtual environment. So instead of running a VM inside your OS like you would do with VMware workstation or Quemu or Microsoft Virtual Server.. all the operating systems would run in a VM side by side. Kinda neat idea. Stuff that IBM has been doing with their mainframes for 30 years now (no kidding). x86 is finally catching up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HypervisorSo you can see how that would all tie into each other. Now new hardware allows x86 to be abstracted easier with no software emulation.. Also in the future things like a new PCIexpress extensions will allow operating systems to directly access hardware resources and still be managed by a hypervisor.. (right now with Xen/Linux your setting up hardware volumes in Linux and virtual network devices for client operating systems to use).
Also if your using shared storage and have enough RAM resources aviable you can migrate running operating systems from machine to machine with no downtime. Xen folks once setup a demo test of Linux host running a Quake3 server. While people were playing on it they migrated the OS image from one machine to another without the gaming clients even noticing it. I knew a fella that migrated a server farm from one geographical location to another to avoid the hurricaines from last year in a similar manner.
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