DynAMOS is founded on a new dynamic instrumentation technique called adaptive function cloning. Dynamic instrumentation is the technique of inserting code instruments directly in the memory image of a running system.
In support of dynamic updates, some operating systems have been designed from scratch to be adaptable or hot-swappable. Examples include SPIN, the Exokernel and K42. These solutions require significant changes in the way the operating system and applications are crafted. They cannot be generally applied to commodity operating systems like Linux without kernel source code modifications.
Dynamic instrumentation systems like KernInst and GILK made it possible to instrument kernel code in fixed (e.g. SPARC) and variable (e.g. i386) instruction-length architectures respectively. However, they have not addressed the issue of dynamic software updates in general. They focus on performance profiling, including the tools DTrace and Pin.
Other dynamic software updating systems include DYMOS, and Ginseng, but they are limited to userspace updates. These systems recompile user programs enabling them to be dynamically updateable. They cannot be dynamically applied to a running system.
Binary rewriters like ATOM and EEL also do not support dynamic software updates.