KSplice in Fedora?

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 17:34 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> > The difference with what Ksplice inc. are now offering for Ubuntu is
> > that they also provide a stream of pre-prepared updates for the released
> > Ubuntu kernels (the "Uptrack" service).
> 
> And as I explained, this can't be done for the released Fedora kernels
> (because they get big changes which ksplice cannot handle), unless you

Which is more or less what I was getting at in the following message:

> The frontend is Ksplice Inc's Uptrack service, not ksplice. The
> installable bits of Uptrack seem to be GPLv2 (only the artwork has an
> exception which is fair enough). I couldn't find any of the backend bits
> available for download though and as others have pointed out in this
> thread there's still the problem of making ksplice fit in with Fedora's
> approach to kernel updates (to be honest, I think it'd be a lot easier
> to run a service like this for RHEL or CentOS particularly if you're
> only interested in selected security errata).

On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 17:34 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> start from the GA kernel and only backport security fixes, which makes the
> kernel you provide become completely different from the current Fedora
> kernel over time.

Not necessarily GA but yes, it's a lot of additional work and a struggle
to fit this to the normal approach to kernel updates in Fedora.

To be honest, I'm glad to have the ksplice tools in the distribution as
it makes it easy to play with them if you're interested in the
technology but I do think that the applicability of this tool to a
distribution like Fedora is probably a lot less than it would be for
e.g. one of the "enterprise" distributions for the simple fact that end
users who are particularly intolerant to reboots are likely already
looking for a platform with a longer release and support cycle and
stronger (i.e. commercial) support guarantees.

Fedora users who just want quicker reboots can always make use of kexec.
Along with the boot time improvements in recent releases that should
make installing and booting a new kernel pretty quick (apart from the
inconvenience of shutting down applications).

Regards,
Bryn.