Systems, especially operating systems, are becoming more complex to the
point where maintaining them by humans is becoming nearly impossible.
Many corporations have recognized this trend and have begun investing in
autonomic technology. Autonomic technology allows a piece of software to
monitor, diagnose, and repair itself. This can be used for improved
performance, reliability, maintainability, security, etc. Disclosed
herein is a mechanism to allow operating systems to hot swap a piece of
operating system code, while continuing to offer to the user the service
which that code is providing. This can be used, for examples, to increase
the performance of an application or to fix a detected security hole live
without bringing the machine down. Some autonomic ability will be
mandatory in next generation operating system for without it they will
collapse under their own complexity. The invention offers a key component
of being able to achieve autonomic computing.