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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the no-reboots dept.

LWN (formerly Linux Weekly News) reports [lwn.net]

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 [dustinkirkland.com]; 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 [phoronix.com]

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 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 [cloudlinux.com].

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