Ksplice

Infobox Software
name = Ksplice



caption =
developer = MIT
latest_release_version =
latest_release_date =
latest_preview_version =
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operating_system = Linux
genre = Kernel extension
license = GNU General Public License
website = [http://web.mit.edu/ksplice/ web.mit.edu/ksplice]

Ksplice is an extension of the Linux kernel. It allows system administrators to apply security patches to the kernel without having to reboot. Ksplice has been implemented for Linux on the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. It is currently being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To be fully automatic, Ksplice's design is limited to patches that do not introduce semantic changes to data structures, but most Linux kernel security patches don't make these kinds of changes. An evaluation against Linux kernel security patches from May 2005 to December 2007 finds that Ksplice can automatically apply 84% of the 50 significant kernel vulnerabilities from this interval.

Ksplice can, without restarting the kernel, apply any source code patch that only needs to modify the kernel text. Unlike other hot update systems, Ksplice takes as input only a unified diff and the original kernel source code, and it updates the running kernel correctly, with no further human assistance required. Additionally, taking advantage of Ksplice does not require any preparation before the system is originally booted (the running kernel does not need to have been specially compiled, for example).

Ksplice is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 2).

References

* [http://web.mit.edu/ksplice/doc/ksplice.pdf Ksplice overview (PDF)]

External links

*http://web.mit.edu/ksplice/