my name is Kishan, and I’m an information science student interested in contributing to Haiku for GSOC 2026.I recently started exploring Haiku’s source code and architecture because I’m interested in operating systems and low-level development. I’m currently looking into the idea of a kexec-style mechanism that could allow the system to load a new kernel without going through the full reboot process.At the moment, I’m studying the boot process and trying to understand how the kernel starts in Haiku.
I would appreciate any guidance on
whether this idea has been discussed before
which parts of the codebase would be good to study first
I’m Pavan, new contributor like you interested in kexec.
when i approached korli (mentor) sent some links to me to understand about kexec, so i will send those links to you can read and understand.
if you have any doubts regarding this, you can contact either korli or haiku forum.
Hi pavan, thank u for the warm welcome! I really appreciate your help. It seems the links weren’t included in the message could you please share them when you get a chance? Thanks again!
It was suggested by one of Haiku developers. It would save us a ton of time when debugging the kernel. The edit/compile/reboot cycle is not exactly great for testing currently.
Also, usually for GSoC we offer ideas like this, that are useful to us, but not in the critical path of the OS development. You wouldn’t want the next beta release to depend on a GSoC intern who never worked on the project before, and the intern wouldn’t want such pressure either. So, GSoC is a nice opportunity to do such “side projects” which are otherwise not the top priorities.
At least for virtual machines it is possible to make firmware startup phase really fast. Modern PC also support fast boot. So I do not think that it will give significant reboot time speed up.
Most time is currently spent in kernel add-ons startup, not firmware.