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Linux 4.0 Getting No-Reboot Patching

Posted by Soulskill on from the post-your-uptimes dept.

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."

5 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Starting to feel old by Gumbercules!! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm starting to feel old. I'm still on 2.6.x on my boxes.

    1. Re:Starting to feel old by NatasRevol · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Only people without servers in production/critical environments ask 'why haven't you upgraded already?'

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    2. Re:Starting to feel old by haruchai · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And that's how my team ended up supporting 10 - 25 yr old fossilized gear running all kinds of old, insecure shit that almost noone can remember what's the login or sometimes what's it for.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  2. Re:scientific computing by chuckymonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you have weeks long running jobs on your desktop you're doing it wrong. There's a reason servers exist in datacenters. I work in scientific computing and people running jobs on their desktop is a huge problem, they spend ridiculous amounts of money for something like a Mac Prol to run this stuff on when they should be buying actual servers instead. Then complain when their desktop is running like shit or their job fails because the building took an intermittent power hit. You can even put GPU compute in servers and have a lot less concern for your systems going down.

    --
    "Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
  3. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's been used for decades everywhere except the PC and it's server variants. It's no more a risk than current patching that requires a reboot, except that you don't have the downtime of a reboot.

    A bad patch is a bad patch. Have backups, have redundancy.

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    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.