IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2011-11-18

<nocturnal> I'm learning about GNU Hurd and was speculating with a friend
  who is also a computer enthusiast. I would like to know if Hurds
  microkernel can recover services should they crash? and if it can, does
  that recovery code exist in multiple services or just one core kernel
  service? 
<braunr> nocturnal: you should read about passive translators
<braunr> basically, there is no dedicated service to restore crashed
  servers
<etenil> Hi everyone!
<braunr> services can crash and be restarted, but persistence support is
  limited, and rather per serivce
<braunr> actually persistence is more a side effect than a designed thing
<braunr> etenil: hello
<etenil> braunr: translators can also be spawned on an ad-hoc basis, for
  instance when accessing a particular file, no?
<braunr> that's what being passive, for a translator, means
<etenil> ah yeah I thought so :)

IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2011-11-19

<chromaticwt> will hurd ever have the equivalent of a rs server?, is that
  even possible with hurd?
<youpi> chromaticwt: what is an rs server ?
<chromaticwt> a reincarnation server
<youpi> ah, like minix. Well, the main ground issue is restoring existing
  information, such as pids of processes, etc.
<youpi> I don't know how minix manages it
<antrik> chromaticwt: I have a vision of a session manager that could also
  take care of reincarnation... but then, knowing myself, I'll probably
  never imlement it
<youpi> we do get proc  crashes from times to times
<youpi> it'd be cool to see the system heal itself :)
<braunr> i need a better description of reincarnation
<braunr> i didn't think it would make core servers like proc able to get
  resurrected in a safe way
<antrik> depends on how it is implemented
<antrik> I don't know much about Minix, but I suspect they can recover most
  core servers
<antrik> essentially, the condition is to make all precious state be
  constantly serialised, and held by some third party, so the reincarnated
  server could restore it
<braunr> should it work across reboots ?
<antrik> I haven't thought about the details of implementing it for each
  core server; but proc should be doable I guess... it's not necessary for
  the system to operate, just for various UNIX mechanisms
<antrik> well, I'm not aware of the Minix implementation working across
  reboots. the one I have in mind based on a generic session management
  infrastructure should though :-)