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lacrosse1991
Asked: 2015-03-25 15:35:38 +0800 CST

Is it possible to reboot a Linux OS without rebooting the hardware?

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Is there a way to reboot a Linux system (Debian in particular) without rebooting the hardware?

I have a RAID controller that takes a bit to get itself running before the OS starts up, and I would like it if there was a way to quickly reboot the Linux OS without having to go through the whole reboot process of restarting the RAID controller, etc.

linux

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I use kexec-reboot on nearly all of my production systems.

    It works incredibly well, allowing me to bypass the long POST time on HP ProLiant servers and reduce the boot cycle from 5 minutes to ~45 seconds.

    See: https://github.com/error10/kexec-reboot

    The only caveat is that it doesn't seem to work on RHEL/CentOS 6.x systems booting UEFI. But most sane OS/hardware combinations work.

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  2. Yes, it is possible. kexec will allow a Linux kernel to be booted directly from Linux without going through the BIOS boot process.

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  3. Yes. You must use kexec-tools. To make the life easier, I use kexec-reboot.

    $sudo apt-get install kexec-tools
$wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vadmium/kexec-reboot/master/kexec-reboot
$chmod +x kexec-reboot
$sudo mv kexec-reboot /usr/local/sbin/kexec-reboot
$sudo /usr/local/sbin/kexec-reboot
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