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Patch the Linux Kernel Without Reboots

Posted by kdawson on from the click-n-go dept.

evanbro writes "ZDNet is reporting on ksplice, a system for applying patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting. ksplice requires no kernel modifications, just the source, the config files, and a patch. Author Jeff Arnold discusses the system in a technical overview paper (PDF). Ted Ts'o comments, 'Users in the carrier grade linux space have been clamoring for this for a while. If you are a carrier in telephony and don't want downtime, this stuff is pure gold.'" Update: 04/24 10:04 GMT by KD : Tomasz Chmielewsk writes on LKML that the idea seems to be patented by Microsoft.

1 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. No, No, No and No again. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As an admin for some -very- high availability systems, load balancers are not a silver bullet. This solution would most apply for running one-node clusters who are using a single machine as a perimeter network device. (ex. firewall) I see lots of these in the racks at our NOC provider.

    1. We connect to several load balanced systems and the complexity introduced by load balancers translates to inexplicable down time. No load balancers means a pretty steady diet of the latest and greatest server hardware, but no down time. The a few minutes of down time costs more than the server hardware.

    2. High availability translates more roughly into nodes that can fail (ex. power off) and not take the cluster down. This boils down to active-passive application architecture more than just using heartbeat.

    As an FYI, PostgreSQL clustering is a killer application for me. Erlang is also great in many ways, but requires application architecture with active-passive node awareness. Which isn't present in things like Yaws, or even my other favorite non-erlang app nginx. Heartbeat is the solution there, but I'd like to see yaws be cluster aware on its own. http://yaws.hyber.org/