Hi,

> > In regards to overwriting existing binaries which might be in use,
> > whatever happened to "Text file busy"?  That would catch any renegade
> > makefiles which might be trying to copy onto an in-use binary.  This
> > would be handy even in the trivial case of, say, /sbin/init :-)
> 
> IMO it wouldn't.  That would prevent the installation of that binary;
> in this circumstance I _want_ to replace init.  I just don't want the
> kernel to panic over seeing the old inode, kept around by the text
> segment reference to it, as it's going down.

How about this instead: Whenever someone tries to write over a textfile
that is busy, the kernel renames the old file to some temporary name -
preferably starting with a . (dot) - and removes this file when the
program quits? It should be made a compiletime-option whether this feature
should be active or not.

Just an idea.

  Guenther