Slashdot Mirror

Some people seem to like forced reboots (see other replies to the parent comment), but I'm not one of them.

There is really solid work for live patching a Linux kernel for security updates in http://www.ksplice.com/ - saw a demo of it last week at Eurosys, really impressive: http://www.ksplice.com/paper .

There is really solid work for live patching a Linux kernel for security updates in http://www.ksplice.com/ - saw a demo of it last week at Eurosys, really impressive: http://www.ksplice.com/paper .

Sorry to say Linux yes its doable. But you really have to know the tricks.

http://www.ksplice.com/ ksplice can do a lot of kernel updates without needing rebooting.
Then http://www.bootchart.org/ to make sure boot up process is as fast as able. With tuning of the boot and shutdown process 5.3 mins at year gives you at least 10 reboots. Yes 30 second reboots is possible 15 secs to get all services up and serving again and the services shutdown in the last 5 seconds before going to bios or kexec. Yet Linux kernels only update ever 3 in internal structs is only 4 reboots a year so you have spare quite a few spares. Even better if the effected bit is in a module you can just unload and reload.

Now what about those bios's that take forever. kexec Linux kernel loading it replacement so bios is removed from maths. This even saves a few seconds because you can have the replacement kernel and its intrd loaded into ram before you even start the shutdown.

Now this might sound all so great sorry that is still too slow. kexec hot swap is under development. Nice little feature where you run both kernels side by side and transfer control over.

5 9's is reachable as long as hardware failure does not hit. Windows is way behind the game. With kexec hot swap 100 percent uptime is achievable without hardware failure no cluster.