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Linux 4.0 Getting No-Reboot Patching
An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet reports that the latest changes to the Linux kernel include the ability to apply patches without requiring a reboot. From the article: "Red Hat and SUSE both started working on their own purely open-source means of giving Linux the ability to keep running even while critical patches were being installed. Red Hat's program was named kpatch, while SUSE' is named kGraft. ... At the Linux Plumbers Conference in October 2014, the two groups got together and started work on a way to patch Linux without rebooting that combines the best of both programs. Essentially, what they ended up doing was putting both kpatch and kGraft in the 4.0 Linux kernel." Note: "Simply having the code in there is just the start. Your Linux distribution will have to support it with patches that can make use of it."
I'm starting to feel old. I'm still on 2.6.x on my boxes.
I remember being surprised when I found out Ksplice costs money.
Finally, they gave us a thing for the change from 3.x to 4.x make sense.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Against being for for or against. Why can't we just all get along?
Wasn't this posted a week or two ago?
Isn't there a Women in STEM or global warming thread for you to infest?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Wow, not only is the story a dupe, so is the lame attenpt to hijack it and.make it about/ whine about systemd.
Now all we need is for aa bunch of dupes pointing this out and we can just take off for a mini vacation before we all fork the kernel and role our own and try to hijack every other linux story.
I do not know what to think about systemd other than it seens to work but i do know i'm about sick with the people trying to inject it inti any linux related story. Perhaps someone should just move to BSD or something.
"Simply having the code in there is just the start. Your Linux distribution will have to support it with patches that can make use of it."
Darn. It looks like I'm gonna have to patch and reboot so I won't have to reboot after I patch.
will be important for scientific computing. One of the weak points of OSX is the necessity to reboot even for minor stuff (but its also getting better there. Most upgrades in linux already do not require any reboot which is nice when having jobs running for weeks.
Is it just me that is rather uncomfortable about the ability to do seamless, run time, patching on (any) operating system? Isn't there a rather large elephant of a precedent out there somewhere for the sorts of things that this facility this feature could be misused for?
I bet you use a HOSTS file.
Sure, just put your guard down first before me and it will all be OK
15 years later...
Novel was such an amazing product to work with, I had servers with 300 some days up time.
We also had Lanmanager, up time, a few days, a week at best.
Usually that kind of claim would bring apk out of the woodwork.
Maybe he's incapacitated or dead.
We can only hope.
In a world, where slashdot stories get repeated at least twice per week, one man had finally had enough.
Dilbert Smith was your average computer programmer, until one day, it happened, and the world would never be the same.
Jean Claude Van Damme is .... The UNDUPLICATOR.
What's it like in your parallel world? I'm running an investment and billing platform, as well as the testing and development environments on ~60 Linux instances far more securely than if it was on Windows. We have 4 Windows servers in our platform for AD and because someone requires reporting in MS SQL, and they spend far more time patching and rebooting than the ~60 Linux instances do. That OS *is* profitable enough for someone to want to fix it, and yet it still hasn't been.
Go spread your FUD elsewhere.
They should have left it out of the Kernel.
Fork it private after server farms and enterprises and distros adopt it
and you have a weaponized paradigm for private leverage of the kernel, as a whole.
Seriously, this is as bad as when we allowed compile, static link from code. Useful for education, but also for crackers.
Time to fork the kernel and take control back from this zealot that only thinks about progress. Where did the kernel go wrong? Around the time we introduced USB support I think.
Let's roll back to that one and kick ass these 'desktop' miscreants out of our community once and for all. Fuck progress!
Was there general consensus that both methods complemented each other or was it one of those "ours is best so we want it in"? Having looked at how they work each has its pluses and minuses but they couldn't have come up with one? Seems to me like they were sitting around going "yea these are so different there is no way to combine them to make one... and we dont want ours to be left out so fuck it, use em both."
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Didn't Torvalds talk about this last week? This is hardly news.
The correct answer is 42.
He's on CentOS; they have this absurd scheme for kernels where they freeze the reported version and apply "selected patches" for 5+ years, so you never know what bugs are fixed.
You can get the kernel changelog easily enough:
rpm --changelog kernel
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
If you were lost in the 3.0 kernels just wait until you try 4.0. Gone are the days of simply using ifconfig or adding a shell script to run on startup. Move to some form of BSD where the development process is sane. Changing for the sake of change is not a good idea.
sorry AC, I've got no mod points for you, but you are exactly right, except in the good old days of NW 3.x , netware admins would laugh at someone bragging about 300 days of uptime. I worked with NW sites that had servers with years of uptime. I've had unix servers that had years of uptime, not that that was a smart thing. It just meant they were running on reliable HW and hadn't been patched for years. With NW you could have servers with years of uptime and up to date SW.
The last NW site I worked at (late 90s maybe?) was shutting down NW servers that had been up non-stop since they were deployed years before to replace them with Windows servers as part of some lame-brained management driven "server consolidation" plan. Wonder how much money they "saved" with that?
Very cool that you can now patch and reload the core without a reboot, I just wonder how they handle when data structures change dramatically between major versions, will they replace the running data with predefined?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
One place I worked at we had a horribly out of date NW server on the network that nobody knew where it was... I searched for weeks and could not find it. Finally years later it was found inside a wall because of previous construction it was placed out of the way and covered with a plastic tarp.
So it was running all those years WITH NO AIRFLOW and no reboots. A testament to old SCSI hard drives.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Make that: rpm -q --changelog kernel
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
If the hatered of systemd was channeled into something positive we would have world peace, a cure for cancer, a dirt cheap environmentaly friendly energy source, AND the mos kick-ass operating system the world has ever seen.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Such datacentre-level facilities often take decades to come down to consumer hardware and consumer OS.
Virtualisation is, to x86 PC's, relatively new. But we've been doing it on the proper hardware for decades.
It's not that some things were so brilliant, it's that the features are rarely needed and take a long time to filter down to commodity OS and hardware.
Hell, I've never needed a cluster-based filesystem, and you don't see me complaining that Windows didn't introduce one to Windows until decades after they existed.
On-the-fly patching, like a lot of features, isn't something needed on commodity OS. Virtualised infrastructure and distributed systems and high-availability features have largely made such things pointless up until now.
But now that we're pushing for zero downtime clouds and mobile devices that can stay on for months at a time, it's good to revisit, re-purpose and use the established technology to do so. Before? Why did we need it when Linux would barely resume from suspend reliably?
While the kernel can be live patched, still some fundamentals pieces will lack live patch in the desktop, like X.org and libc. Ok, reboot a desktop is not that terrible task and not inconvenient like for a server. But it'd be nice to have.
Thanks for your CV but we're not recruiting right now.
Why is it that any criticism of Linux must be viewed as troll bait from the other team. Why did you mention Windows? I didn't. Do you feel the need to feel superior to the majority of the population. Actually your whole post smacks of that so don't bother replying.
Isn't there a Women in STEM or global warming thread for you to infest?
If systemd has any bearing on women in STEM or global warming, then truly its scope has become more vast than any dared to dream or dread.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
OSX on the desktop is only for people who are too stupid to understand anything....
If the hatered of systemd was channeled into something positive we would have world peace, a cure for cancer, a dirt cheap environmentaly friendly energy source, AND the mos kick-ass operating system the world has ever seen.
It is being channeled into something positive. Preventing the infestation of systemd into all distros to the exclusion of all else, including superior alternatives such as openrc. In that the resulting systems are thus more transparent (whether debian, gentoo, calculate or funtoo), the software running on them is more reliable, and unless those searching for world peace, a cure for cancer, or dirt cheap environment energy are foolish enough to choose RedHat or another systemd-infested distroy, they are likely to find their answers with less downtime, and therefore sooner.
So you see, systemd-hatred yields positive results simply by strengthening the backbone of those distros still resisting the infestation, and thus the world is made a much better place even before cancer is cured, cheap energy abounds, and global peace is achieved.
lol.. Just like sysV is an inherent discussion topic for anything related to linux? How about X11 or whatever it is now? Grep, and VI I guess should always be on topic too.
I think you have too much emotionally invested in something and and it's clouding your judgement.
Sending him a postcard seemed to shut him up real quick in one case I remember reading about on here a year or so back.
Have you ever even used a modern Linux distro?
X11 is optional, and can be easily removed without preventing the entire OS installation from booting. The same goes for vi. Even grep could probably be removed relatively safely. On any decent distro, this can be done with a single package manager command.
Good luck doing that with systemd. You likely won't even have a choice about whether or not systemd will be installed in the first place. And there's no easy way to uninstall it, either. Yeah, you can spend days trying to manually remove systemd and use something else, but you'll likely trash your installation. Plus doing that defeats the purpose of using a Linux distro in the first place.
In practice, systemd is the kernel these days, with the Linux kernel merely being a device driver of sorts that systemd uses to interface with the hardware.
The fact that systemd only runs on Linux proves this. While X11, vi and grep can run on the BSDs, OS X and even Windows, the same is not true for systemd. It is one with the Linux kernel, and only the Linux kernel. They are the two mutually-depended halves of what is called "Linux".
At least women in STEM and global warming are important issues....
Wow, I get the joke wasn't funny, but it's on topic, not off topic. An "overrated" mod would be more appropriate than an "off topic" one.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What's it like in your parallel world? I'm running an investment and billing platform, as well as the testing and development environments on ~60 Linux instances far more securely than if it was on Windows. We have 4 Windows servers in our platform for AD and because someone requires reporting in MS SQL, and they spend far more time patching and rebooting than the ~60 Linux instances do. That OS *is* profitable enough for someone to want to fix it, and yet it still hasn't been.
Go spread your FUD elsewhere.
Nice to hear that it works for you, but of the big PC operating systems (Win/Mac/Lin/BSD), Linux is clearly the most buggy one.
Install gentoo. Lay off the caffeine and try being happy for a while.
Isn't there a Women in STEM or global warming thread for you to infest?
If systemd has any bearing on women in STEM or global warming, then truly its scope has become more vast than any dared to dream or dread.
Does seem to be trolls that try ot turn every topic into a referendum on systemd.
And those three topics generate a lot of activity.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
this will give users less reason to use them.
sorry AC, I've got no mod points for you, but you are exactly right, except in the good old days of NW 3.x , netware admins would laugh at someone bragging about 300 days of uptime.
I've had over 200 days uptime on my Vista desktop system, and that was ended by a power cut. Uptime isn't really anything to brag about any more.
You suggested Gentoo? Really? Sorry, aside from a few basement-dwelling neckbeards, nobody wants to wait a week for their installation to finish compiling. Gentoo is not an option.
The freak was unnerved by being doxxed? Sweet. Also, amusing given that he has had so many public faildoxes on others.
We are heading to the situation where patching the kernel will be faster than patching applications:
Kernel upgrade: no downtime
Adjusting a parameter in Java application: wait for 4 minutes for Glassfish to restart
Once again, the glorious GNU/Linux master race leads in fabulous innovation and putting Windows itself to shame.
Through /dev/kmem, loadable modules, and whatever. Nothing new.
Even though the technology has been there for some time, it's good that these organizations have collaborated together and implemented this. Awesome stuff. GNU/Linux is probably the only OS that is able to accomplish this. Windows can't even touch a no-reboot OS like this. So, those using Microsoft will continue to patch and reboot their systems on a regular basis, which takes a LOT of resources. Obviously, GNU/Linux will and should excel in various markets, because it truly is better and more stable. And not having to reboot is a huge deal in the datacenter. Now, we can get this technology without various licensing requirements even though the technology has been free up until now anyway.
This...this is amazing!