Trying Out kGraft Live Kernel Patching On Ubuntu Linux

KGraft is the SUSE-developed approach to live-patching the Linux kernel as another reboot-less option similar to Ksplice.

Besides kGraft and Ksplice, Red Hat coincidentally shortly after the release of Ksplice had announced Kpatch as their means of live patching a running kernel. Both Red Hat and SUSE have open-sourced their live patching mechanisms and both hope to have their solution mainlined, or some unified form of both. While no solution has been queued up for merging in the Linux 3.16 kernel, there still is a lot of interest by Linux developers in these solutions.

Canonical hasn't come out with their own live kernel patching solution (fortunately) nor taken any public side in the matter. However, kGraft is now being tested on Ubuntu with its kernel. Chris Arges, a Canonical employee that's serving as a kernel engineer, has written a blog post about using kGraft on Ubuntu. SUSE's kGraft patches were updated against the Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic" kernel and has published a pre-built test kernel for those interested. For those interested in learning more about trying kGraft on Ubuntu can read his blog post.