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How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

thenewstack.io

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Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#51

Post by ies7 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #43
faitswulff wrote: post #22

> So, if you’d rather not have downtime with your servers, data centers, and clouds, follow Meta’s example and use live patching. You’ll be glad you did. Most orgs don’t need and won’t benefit from emulating Meta for the sake of emulating Meta.

This sort of criticism gets repeated all the time ("Google designs for Google scale, but you're not Google, so don't use kubernetes!"), and sometimes it's fair, but this doesn't really make sense to me on this particular article. If the infrastructure exists within your org's distribution of choice to do this, it's basically all upside. On AL2023, you just do: `sudo dnf install -y kpatch-dnf kpatch-runtime` `sudo dnf…

> Super simple, one less thing to worry about.

We got bitten by kpatch a few times before decided to abandon it around 2017.

From kpatch github (2023):

WARNING: Use with caution! Kernel crashes, spontaneous reboots, and data loss may occur!

Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#54

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

sweettea wrote: post #45
ChatGTP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ads act as a recommendation engine, helping people find solutions to their problems sometimes before they ever realize there is a solution.

Ads are intended to convince people to spend money. In a perfect world that might mean actually being useful solutions, but I have zero faith that that's even a passing concern in reality.

Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#55

Post by kyboren »

phyrex wrote: post #49
ChatGTP wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the users are the products. It’s not free.

You’re not paying them out of your own pocket. I’ll happily use a better word for that if you have one.

Ass, gas, or grass; nobody rides for free. In this case you're paying with your ass. You're turning tricks for Zuck.

Meta pimps your mind out to anybody who wants to take a crack at you, to manipulate your political views or extract money out of you. In return, they give you purses and pay for you to get your nails did.

Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#56

Post by saagarjha »

sweettea wrote: post #45
ChatGTP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ads act as a recommendation engine, helping people find solutions to their problems sometimes before they ever realize there is a solution.

Yeah and casinos offer people some good clean fun. Definitely no incentives here to ”suggest” things people they don’t need or benefit from having, right?

Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#57

Post by grepfru_it »

Sarkie wrote: post #53
fragmede wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have objections to the name, but it goes under Ksplice for User Space. https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/post/ksplice-zero-do...

How was Oracle to work at?

Not OP but I loved oracle in the 90s/early 2000s. After the Sun acquisition it became cutthroat and I left. IBM acquiring redhat seems very similar

Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#58

Post by travoc »

phyrex wrote: post #40
ChatGTP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It’s a very reductive take. Meta is helping a lot of people get and keep in touch for free (like my family is all over the place and we use WhatsApp extensively to communicate). There’s clearly a demand for this, and doing it for the price of a couple of ads doesn’t seem sad to me

Did Meta create WhatsApp? Or did they just buy it to sell ads and track its users?

Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#59

Post by mattboardman »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #27

I wish they mentioned how long a full deployment takes Meta using this method, that seems like an important detail to omit. > So, if you’d rather not have downtime with your servers, data centers, and clouds, follow Meta’s example and use live patching. You’ll be glad you did. Maybe if you're working at Meta's scale it makes sense... But I think most well designed services and applications should be able to get by ju…

There's more in-depth information on that subject here:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi23/presentation/grubic

Re: How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale

#60

Post by raincom »

hellozomo wrote: post #10

"Draining and un-draining hosts is hard." I'd stop right there and fix that, because that's a bullshit reason. Cycling hosts in and out of service is easy unless you're not doing things properly. The Linux kernel is simply not designed to be live patched and it's a total hack to try to do it, it will never work 100% of the time, always be a source of uncertainty, and always be expensive in terms of engineering work.…

Redhat provides kpatches for 6 months, that's all. If you are running a year old kernel, no kpatches are provided for that kernel. Definitely, one needs to recycle hosts every six months.
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