[Info-vax] Reloading device drivers on x86-64 VMS

[Craig A. Berry]

On 3/8/15 12:37 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2015-03-08 18:31:43 +0000,   VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG said:
>
>> In article <mdhkh6$8vd$1 at dont-email.me>, "Craig A. Berry"
>> <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> writes:
>>> On 3/8/15 8:17 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>>
>>>> But yes, it'd be very nice to have the ability to unload and reload
>>>> drivers.
>>>
>>> Shareable images too, while you're at it, but that's a different topic.
>>
>> ???  You already can.
>
> That's very likely a reference to reloading shareable images within the
> context of a running process and the image activator, not a running system.
> AFAIK, the image activator doesn't support that, short of restarting the
> process or performing some undocumented and unsupported and inner-mode
> hackery.
> The simple expedient of finding and deleting the associated virtual
> address space won't likely produce the expected results, either.

Yes, I'm talking about a dlclose() or equivalent that actually frees up
resources. Though the standard doesn't require that,[1] it would still
be nice to have for long-running processes that load lots of images.


[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/dlclose.html