A Taxonomy of Live Updates
Cristiano Giuffrida, Andrew S. Tanenbaum · 2010
Many high-availability systems require regular software updates but can hardly afford any downtime. Existing general-purpose live update approaches proposed as a solution to this problem have failed to reach broad acceptance. In this paper, we investigate the root causes of the poor acceptance and argue that a new model is necessary to offer adequate dependability guarantees. To substantiate our claim, we propose a taxonomy of live updates and analyze many practical examples from operating systems. We show how the nature of the update is crucial to determine the properties and limitations of the resulting live update process and discuss the emerging need for update-aware systems. 1