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LWN (formerly Linux Weekly News) reports
Canonical has announced the availability of a live kernel patch service for the 16.04 LTS release. "It's the best way to ensure that machines are safe at the kernel level, while guaranteeing uptime, especially for container hosts where a single machine may be running thousands of different workloads."
Up to three systems can be patched for free; the service requires a fee thereafter. There is a long FAQ about the service in this blog post; it appears to be based on the mainline live-patching functionality with some Canonical add-ons.
Another distro, not wanting to be left out of the recent abundance of limelight has made some noise of its own.
Phoronix reports
KernelCare Is Another Alternative To Canonical's Ubuntu Live Kernel Patching
The folks from CloudLinux wrote in to remind us of their kernel patching solution, which they've been offering since 2014 and believe is a superior solution to Canonical's service. KernelCare isn't limited to just Ubuntu 16.04 but also works with Ubuntu 14.04 and other distributions such as CentOS/RHEL, Debian, and other enterprise Linux distributions.
Another big difference to Canonical's Livepatch is that KernelCare does support rollback functionality while Canonical doesn't appear to support it at this time. KernelCare can also handle custom patches, 32-bit support, and they share they plan [sic] to soon begin offering livepatching support for glibc, OpenSSL, and QEMU.
The downside though is that KernelCare appears to rely upon some binary blobs as part of its service. Pricing on KernelCare ranges from $25 to $45 USD per year depending upon the number of licenses being purchased.
[Details at] CloudLinux.com.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:20PM
Maybe the Red Hat people would buy it
That's not a maybe. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was delivering kpatch while Suse was pushing kgraft since circa 2014. Oracle was doing it with ksplice since 2011, after buying it off Ksplice, Inc which was doing the same since 2008.
they have entirely different needs to general Ubuntu users, however.
Ubuntu is quite popular in cloud infrastructure both for VMs and containers. Most developers aren't system admins and don't want to code around library versions so after they get their project compiled and running under their Ubuntu workstations, they look for Ubuntu hosting services.
Binary blobs and DLC licensing...
It's what keeps Red Hat in the green. It's why there's so many Docker and AppImage projects out there. And yeah, Android...
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:45PM
Forgetful me failed to include the story that mentioned that stuff.
Previous: Kernel Live-Patching Moving into the Linux Kernel [soylentnews.org]
That references other related stories as well.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday October 27 2016, @03:29AM
Good to know about kexec.
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