Suse with live kernel upgrade

[viking60]

Suse has developed a live kernel patch system. This is useful for servers who should stay up all the time. Having to reboot to make important kernel patches work is bad for business. Uptime is the holy grail of computing - simply because time is money. So gone are the Monday "patch-days" where everyone had time for an extra coffee or the overtime during weekends for the IT techs. So far this has not been entirely impossible since programs like Ksplice and OpenVZ Checkpointing could perform the task. So how come this is news? Well ksplice has stopped developing the open source version so you have to pay for it. Oracle needs to get paid for the time and money invested. The problem with this is that nobody can help Oracle developing it and history has shown that Oracle is not perfect. For this reason it will never be distributed with the Linux kernel - and never work "out of the box". And OpenVZ Checkpointing takes a lot of infrastructure so it is expensive. Now Suse has developed a prototype called kGraft and it updates the kernel while it is running and without interruptions. This will be open source - at least parts of it - and Suse hopes it will be accepted in the kernel. More here