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Live patching for Linux 3.20

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Re: Live patching for Linux 3.20

#31
post #28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup Linux has had a similar feature, kexec, for several years.

Everyone 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.

Linux 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.

Re: Live patching for Linux 3.20

#32

Does anyone have a simple example of how this would work? I can't wrap my head around code evolving during runtime for any arbitrary binary change.

The original academic paper from MIT describing how it works: http://www.ksplice.com/doc/ksplice.pdf

This paper is very readable - thanks for the link.
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