Vista To Be Updated Without Reboots

UltimaGuy writes "Microsoft is working on a new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which will update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine. From the article: 'If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot.'"

Comments

Fixing DLL management... what a novel concept

[KiltedKnight]

I guess now the D really will stand for Dynamic.

Part of the problem has always been that their DLL manager couldn't clean itself up without a reboot.

Re:Fixing DLL management... what a novel concept

[Krach42]

The windows DLL manager has been able to clean up after itself. The problem was that until Vista, everything has been tied in tight together, with a lot of integration between components, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell what could be restarted, and avoid the reboot.

Vista now uses much better compontentization, and this allows them to actually know what components were affected by an upgrade, and need to be restarted.

In the *nix world, everything's been compontentized from the start, and so naturally you were able to restart services instead of the whole machine fro mthe beginning.

Re:funny department

[edwdig]

Except the Vista implementation is better.

Unix systems gladly replace system libraries that are in use, and just hope that not problems happen because two different versions of the same library are in use simultaneously. The further away from the core libraries you get, the lower the odds of a problem, but it's still a risk. The Unix approach is basically "Let's just go ahead and do it, it'll probably be ok."

Windows takes the safe approach of only updating libraries that are not in use. I'm sure you'd wind up with weird glitches if your apps were using multiple versions of GDI simultaneously. The Windows approach is "It may be ok to update this now, or it may not. Just to be safe, let's not update it until we can guarentee it's safe."

The Vista implementation is going to try to free up libraries, and if it can, will then update them in place. If not, you'll still have to reboot.

Great job, Microsoft!

[wbren]

Now if they could only make it so I don't have to restart Firefox every time I install a new extension.

Oops, wrong company...

But seriously, why do people criticize Microsoft so much for requiring occasional reboots when a much simpler application, Firefox, requires a restart every time an extension is installed. It seems like a browser extension would be much easier to load on-the-fly than an update to a core part of an operating system, so why not harp on Firefox? Is it because it isn't a Microsoft product? There are plenty of threads in this story's comments bashing Microsoft, saying it's about time they got their act together regarding reboots, etc. But what if Mozilla suddenly announced Firefox 1.5.1 would be able to load extensions on-the-fly? Everyone would cheer for Firefox and sing praises of such an innovative new feature. This story just reminded me of the double standard regarding Microsoft and, well, everyone that isn't Microsoft.

This new Windows feature sounds cool and it doesn't. I don't really care about rebooting, to be honest. It takes 30 seconds of my time (big deal). Stop adding things like this to Vista and just get it done and shipped. I'm still not going to use Vista for moral (DRM) reasons, but still... there must be some people who want it done sooner rather than later.

See, that is the point

[einhverfr]

Because you don't have separation between directory information and disk information (inodes v. directories) you can't pull the great tricks that UNIX uses (delete/overwrite a file while in use, for example, without the program using it freaking out).