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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 Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:46PM
I do understand the problems with auto-updating. It was one of the things that turned me off of Ubuntu. I rather like the way my Gentoo runs. I ask it to check for updates. It comes up with three, or three hundred different updates. I can browse the list, and decide which, if any, I want to update. Debian is much the same - or it used to be. SystemD was leveraged in there somewhere, and the updates felt less "optional" after that.
Auto updating isn't really such a good idea anyway. Your MITM attack is a valid observation, aside from the fact that some updates just don't work as intended.
I mentioned nvidia drivers, in my last post. I've found it to be foolish to update the drivers immediately after they have been released. Wait a couple weeks, then hit the forums to see how many people are bitching, and about what.
When I still maintained Windows for the family, there was a service pack for WinXP. I think (almost certain) that it was service pack 2. I grabbed it immediately, and applied it. The computer went into an endless reboot cycle, and I didn't know how to break the cycle. Hit some forums, and learn that SP2 tended to do that to some AMD CPU's. Had I waited a week, then hit the forums before updating, I would have saved myself a lot of bother.