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Josh Boyer of the Fedora Project reports
[In Linux kernel 4.0], there is one feature that people (and various media sites) seem to have keyed in on and that is the live patching functionality. This holds the promise of being able to patch your running kernel without rebooting. Indeed, this could be very useful, but it isn't quite there yet. And it also doesn't make a whole lot of sense for Fedora at this time. The Fedora kernels have this functionality disabled, both in Fedora 22 and Rawhide.
What was merged for 4.0 is the core functionality that is shared between two live patching projects, kPatch and kGraft. kPatch is being led by a development team in Red Hat whereas kGraft is being developed by a team from SuSE. They both accomplish the same end result, but they do so via a different approach internally. The two teams met at the Linux Plumbers conference last year and worked on some common ground to make it easier to merge into mainline rather than compete with each other. This is absolutely awesome and an example of how new features should be developed upstream. Kudos to all those involved on that front.
The in-kernel code can accept patches from both methods, but the process and tools to create those patches are still being worked on in their upstream communities. Neither set are in Fedora itself, and likely won't be for some time as it is still fairly early in the life of these projects. After discussing this a bit with the live patching maintainer, we decided to keep this disabled in the Fedora kernels for now. The kernel-playground COPR does have it enabled for those that want to dig in and generate their own patches and are willing to break things and support themselves.
In reality, we might not ever really leverage the live patching functionality in Fedora itself.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @03:19AM
Most likely so that people will use RHEL instead of Fedora.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday May 12 2015, @09:52AM
I would think using another distro would be a better solution to a problem like that. Live kernel patching is fantastic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @02:57PM
Most other major distros are Debian based. Someone who uses Fedora probably does so at the behest of investing in using Fedora. They are not going to switch their whole stack elsewhere to get live kernel patching. So if they are using Fedora now, and they want live Kernel patching they will either need to continuously roll their own Kernel or fork over the cash for RHEL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @08:06PM
Surely people who don't want to fork over the cash for RHEL use CentOS, not Fedora.