[sllug-members]: Apply patches to running kernel?

[Knight Walker]

On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 08:50 -0600, Marc Christensen wrote:
> Apply patches to running kernel: http://web.mit.edu/ksplice/
> 
> Thoughts?  Is this good/bad? Kind of scares me for some reason.

It scares me too, mainly because in-pace hot-fixes are so finicky (the
vsplice one recently didn't work on any machine I tried it on), and it
basically requires (From what I read) that you roll your own kernels,
which is fine for some, but most IT organizations I've seen prohibit
that (either specifically or implicitly).

Most enterprise-grade systems I've seen designed in the last few years
are cluster-based (either two-node hot-standy or multi-node groups), and
they are designed specifically so that one node can be brought down (or
fail), including taking a machine offline for system maintenance.

-KW