Comment by fooker
In software terms, this would be as difficult as switching out specific bits from a running program to fix bugs.
Certainly not impossible, but impractical as far as we can see.
In software terms, this would be as difficult as switching out specific bits from a running program to fix bugs.
Certainly not impossible, but impractical as far as we can see.
that’s pretty much how windows update works (or used to work) to attempt to hot patch certain things without a reboot. Compiled functions in windows DLLs have a 5 byte prologue of nop instructions which is just long enough to overwrite with a jmp instruction to hook the function call and redirect it. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110921-00/?p=95... In WinXP they started compiling this nop prologue in on purpose due to how useful it was. Before that, reverse engineers would need to get a bit lucky and find “room” for a jmp in some code path that was guaranteed to hit, in order to patch an executable without crashing it (iirc, i’m fuzzy on the details). Anyway, certainly not impossible, and we’d al be surprised by what can be made practical if the need is great enough.