Comment by laumars
7 years ago
Windows is a little different: to unload a driver in Windows it needs to support an unload method, which not all drivers do. And without that you cannot even write the updates to disk (due to the file locking vs inode differences which have already been discussed in this thread) let alone load them into the kernel.
That said, if a kernel module is in use on Linux then it’s sometimes no easy task finding the right procedure to follow to do an unload and reload of it.
Ultimately this is all academic though. These things mattered more on monolithic systems with little redundancy but these days it’s pretty trivial to spin up new nodes for most types of services so you wouldn’t get downtime (generally speaking. There are notable exceptions like DB servers on smaller setups where live replication isn’t cost beneficial)
> unload method, which not all drivers do
There comes the question why Microsoft did not implement a standard convention (not API) to unload a driver. They could have said a driver does this and that on unload, and we perform an as-if-shutdown unload if you fail to follow our convention.