Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Ksplice for RedHat

Ksplice, which offers "rebootless" kernel upgrades by performing in-memory patches to your running kernel, now offers their services for RHEL 4 & 5 and the equivalent CentOS variants.

Ksplice was originally developed at MIT, and was later turned into a for-profit venture. Ksplice has raised a small amount of controversy on the linux-kernel mailing list because it is, after all, patching your running kernel. In memory. This makes people a little nervous, but the author, Jeff Arnold, has tried to address many of the concerns.

I think the technology looks interesting. Certainly in the case of known kernel exploits it seems like it offers a happy medium between downtime for maintenance vs. not patching the system at all.

0 comments:

Post a Comment