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Ksplice Offers Rebootless Updates For Ubuntu Systems
sdasher writes "Ksplice has started offering Ksplice Uptrack for Ubuntu Jaunty, a free service that delivers rebootless versions of all the latest Ubuntu kernel security updates. It's currently available for both the 32 and 64-bit generic kernel, and they plan to add support for the virtual and server kernels by the end of the month, according to their FAQ. This makes Ubuntu the first OS that doesn't need to be rebooted for security updates. (We covered Ksplice's underlying technology when it was first announced a year ago.)"
Most of the people who would want to patch a system without rebooting aren't upgrading to get new features - they're applying security fixes, which seldom break binary compatibility. That makes it pretty safe to replace an in-use library. Once the update has been installed, you can restart the affected services on a schedule of your choosing, rather than have several minutes of complete downtime. I would expect that the reason this isn't attempted as often under Windows is that DLLs don't follow any system-wide rigorous versioning system like what most Linux package managers impose. This, and the presence of closed-source software, makes it much harder to do this with confidence under Windows.