3 ms·

I wonder if Amazon or someone will take the time to make a ksplice-like system for Xen so that future security upgrades probably won't have to go through such d

by comex 12y ago

I wonder if Amazon or someone will take the time to make a ksplice-like system for Xen so that future security upgrades probably won't have to go through such disruptive reboot events. (Or, for that matter, whether they considered making an ad-hoc machine code patch - based on the source patch, it looks like it would probably be doable just by changing a few bytes. I guess it's a bit risky...)

semenko 12y ago
Seems a little unlikely, given Ksplice's patents (now Oracle's patents) covering the area. From an older post @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791756 The first is "Method of finding a safe time to modify code of a running computer program": http://bit.ly/ksplice-1 http://bit.ly/ksplice-1 The second is "Method of determining which computer program functions are changed by an arbitrary source code modification": http://bit.ly/ksplice-2 http://bit.ly/ksplice-2
- comex 12y ago
  Sigh. That's obnoxious - yet another example of software patents confusing proving that an idea is commercially valuable with inventing it in the first place. Anyone with the requisite skills in reverse engineering, compilers, etc. could have told you that hot patching functions in memory is possible and would take at most a few minutes to notice that this may be unsafe if some suspended thread is sitting in a function prolog. Yet "identifying a portion of executable code to be updated in a running computer program; and determining whether it is safe to modify the executable code of the running computer program without having to restart the running computer program" (an actual claim, not the abstract or title quotes that people tend to misconstrue) is now locked out for the next decade or so.
soren 12y ago
There's a paper on live updating Xen to be presented next month at a cloud computing security workshop: https://www.trust.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/publications/publication-details/?no_cache=1&tx_bibtex_pi1%5Bpub_id%5D=TUD-CS-2014-0918 https://www.trust.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/publications/pu...

by comex 12y ago

semenko 12y ago

Seems a little unlikely, given Ksplice's patents (now Oracle's patents) covering the area. From an older post @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791756 The first is "Method of finding a safe time to modify code of a running computer program": http://bit.ly/ksplice-1 http://bit.ly/ksplice-1 The second is "Method of determining which computer program functions are changed by an arbitrary source code modification": http://bit.ly/ksplice-2 http://bit.ly/ksplice-2

comex 12y ago
Sigh. That's obnoxious - yet another example of software patents confusing proving that an idea is commercially valuable with inventing it in the first place. Anyone with the requisite skills in reverse engineering, compilers, etc. could have told you that hot patching functions in memory is possible and would take at most a few minutes to notice that this may be unsafe if some suspended thread is sitting in a function prolog. Yet "identifying a portion of executable code to be updated in a running computer program; and determining whether it is safe to modify the executable code of the running computer program without having to restart the running computer program" (an actual claim, not the abstract or title quotes that people tend to misconstrue) is now locked out for the next decade or so.

soren 12y ago

There's a paper on live updating Xen to be presented next month at a cloud computing security workshop: https://www.trust.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/publications/publication-details/?no_cache=1&tx_bibtex_pi1%5Bpub_id%5D=TUD-CS-2014-0918 https://www.trust.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/publications/pu...