14 DAY TRIAL // SUSE Labs has announced a very interesting tool called kGraft that is able to patch the Linux kernel in real time, without having to restart the system.
This might seem hard to believe, but kGraft does exactly that. It’s able to patch the kernel, for a vulnerability for example, and the user doesn't need to restart its system.
“It is longed for by scientists who really do not want to stop a simulation that has been running for the past few months – just because of a needed kernel stability fix. IT staff who run their machines without critical security patches, because the departments they serve cannot agree on a good time for scheduled downtime, dream about it in their sleepless nights,” said Vojtěch Pavlík on the official blog.
kGraft is expected to be launched March, under GPLv3 for parts that touch GCC and GPLv2 for Linux kernel parts, and merged into the upstream projects.
The developers say it that kGraft can do hot fixing, live patching, runtime patching, rebootless updates, and concurrent updates, everything a Linux users could need in order to make his system run indefinitely without restart.