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."

Comments

Starting to feel old

[Gumbercules!!]

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

Re:Starting to feel old

[NatasRevol]

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

Re:Starting to feel old

[haruchai]

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.

Re:Systemd in 4.0-era, for or against?

[Ol Olsoc]

Isn't there a Women in STEM or global warming thread for you to infest?

Chicken, meet egg

[Marginal Coward]

"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.

scientific computing

[e**(i pi)-1]

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.

Re:scientific computing

[chuckymonkey]

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.

Re:Finally...

[Bacon Bits]

Oracle bought it. Still surprised?

Not only that, but Oracle bought it on July 21, 2011. The current version of Ksplice? Released on July 28, 2011. The major feature of the current release? The changelog says the only change was "Removed unnecessary zlib detection from configure." But now only Oracle Linux is supported.

It's still available through source code, which you can find with a bit of digging (you can't navigate to it from the top level page, as far as I can tell... Ksplice isn't listed as a project). I think the amount of investment and effort put in that site makes it clear what Oracle's stance is.

At least Microsoft extends before they extinguish....

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[MachineShedFred]

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.