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This is cool as fuck, I didn't know about kpatch or kGraft. Does anyone know if any other OSs have live kernel patching?
by bjackman 12y ago
This is cool as fuck, I didn't know about kpatch or kGraft.
Does anyone know if any other OSs have live kernel patching?
- feld 12y agoFreeBSD has not gone quite that far, but there was a PoC for loading new kernels without rebooting. https://www.bsdcan.org/2012/schedule/events/325.en.html https://www.bsdcan.org/2012/schedule/events/325.en.html
- SEJeff 12y agoYup Linux has had a similar feature, kexec, for several years.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- feld 12y agoEveryone I talked to about it since has said "nobody seems to care enough to bother completing it" It is kind of a niche feature, really.
- SEJeff 12y agoLinux has this create feature of being able to include the operating system in the initrd. Put this with a nice PXE infrastructure where you pxe the OS and download the initrd with the OS in it. Then you simply kexec to upgrade or downgrade the entire operating system in ~30 seconds. I used to manage a production environment that worked exactly this way for several thousand nodes. Not sure I'd call it niche, but yes, somewhat specialized.
- crististm 12y agoNot that it matters too much for the current ecosystem, but Lisp Machines had this 25 years+ ago.
- lemonade 12y agoI was told by Andrew Tanenbaum some time ago that Minix has had this kind of feature for a number of years now.
- kasabali 12y agoWindows Server 2003 had a live patching feature [1] and it was also applicable to kernel patching according to [2]. For some reason it was quickly abandoned, though. [1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781109%28v=ws.10%29.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781109%28v=ws.... [2] http://jpassing.com/2011/05/01/windows-hotpatching/ http://jpassing.com/2011/05/01/windows-hotpatching/