Oracle Linux 8 – Patching Doesn’t Have to Mean Rebooting

I’ve rebooted when patching for my entire life, why change now?

Since Linux was released back in 1991, when the kernel was patched, you had to reboot the system. At the time, even the IBM mainframes that dominated corporate IT needed to be rebooted when patched, so it was considered normal for all other systems to be rebooted when patched. This process appeared to work fine for almost the next 20 years, but the seeds of change were planted in 2005 when a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student came up with a simple question. What if you could patch without rebooting the system? His team came up with an answer in 2009 when Ksplice was released, enabling the ability to patch a Linux kernel while the system was running.

In this chapter, we will cover why you should start using Ksplice and how it is used to improve the security of your system.

This chapter contains the following recipes:

...