A collaboration between SUSE and Red Hat is going to bring relief to Linux users the world over: they'll be able to patch their systems without reboots.
The live patching infrastructure looks set to become available in version 3.20 of the Linux kernel.
The two organisations introduced their distribution-specific live patching solutions a month apart in 2013 – SUSE's kGraft hit in February, and Red Hat's Kpatch arrived in March.
As SUSE developer Jiri Kosina explains on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, an early shot at live patching called kSplice was acquired and turned into a proprietary service.
He says the SUSE and Red Hat approaches were different: “kPatch is issuing stop_machine()”, inspecting processes and deciding whether the system is safe to patch; “kGraft provides a per-thread consistency during one single pass of a process through the kernel and performs a lazy contiguous migration of threads from 'unpatched' universe to the 'patched' one at safe checkpoints.”
After a discussion at the Linux Plumbers' Conference in Dusseldorf in 2014, the different parties worked out the basis of the new approach.
Source:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/11/linux_to_get_live_patching_in_320/
