Get to know Ksplice: kernel patching was never this easy.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-spunix_ksplice/index.html

by tabbott • 16 years ago

39 9 16 years ago

tzs• 16 years ago

Cool technology--which I'm not letting anywhere near any production server I have control over.

One of the important things rebooting does when updating a kernel is verify that the updated system still boots. If a kernel change turns out to be incompatible with something in your configuration, you really really really want to find that out right away, under controlled circumstances, in a scheduled maintenance window.

You do not want to find it out six months down the road, when you've had an unexpected outage from a power failure or other hardware problem, and can't get your system back up, and have no idea how long its actually been broken (and so no hint as to what broke).

bnoordhuis• 16 years ago

Same goes for rebooting after upgrading libc and other core libraries. Running processes will keep on using the old version of the library and that's problematic with long-running processes like web servers and databases. You don't want to find out months after the fact that your business-critical application is incompatible with the updated library.

chwahoo3• 16 years ago

This idea that OS (or application) startup provides a valuable upgrade sanity check under controlled conditions is an interesting point and one that hadn't occurred to me in my work with runtime upgrades.

However, Ksplice mainly supports security patches which tend to be localized and less risky than large semantic changes or feature additions. I suspect that such changes are extremely unlikely to produce an unbootable system.

nitefly• 16 years ago

If you'd still like to do a scheduled reboot a few times per year, you can--but at least now you can do so at your leisure, without being insecure for days or weeks because your system is not up to date.

wzdd• 16 years ago

Exactly. I saw this back when it was relatively new, at EuroSys 09, and it seemed very smooth, very neat, and very much not what I'd want on anything mission-critical.

The most valuable thing I took out of it was that it is a good lesson in marketing a product. I mean, the tech itself obviously took a lot of work, but it doesn't really attack what people doing dynamic upgrade consider hard problems -- in particular, it doesn't do changes to data very well.

However, look at the way it was presented. Firstly we get good stats to the effect that the vast majority of kernel updates are things that can be done without solving difficult data update problems. This was a particularly important point to make at a research-related conference.

But the marketing doesn't stop there -- they also run a service which you can use to generate updates for you, so you can track from kernel to kernel automatically.

So, the end result is a strong argument for something which a) works most of the time; b) will work for you without much effort on your part; and (most importantly) c) is fantastic bragging rights: "My OS doesn't ever need rebooting!"

In the wrong hands, this would have been a mediocre research project. "Sure we can upgrade the kernel, but we have to interpose functions, create shadow data structures, the result isn't anything like what a "real" kernel would look like after reboot so you have no guarantee of anything, and sometimes it doesn't work". Instead we get something that everybody is talking about and is rapidly emerging as a strong selling point for Linux. My respect to the KSplice team for doing three jobs well: research, implementation, and marketing.

danudey• 16 years ago

My company has just purchased 150-200 ksplice licenses, and it's really a fantastic technology. It loads up a kernel module that does all the runtime patching for you, but if you don't run it, it doesn't update.

The benefit I see here is that it provides you with a kernel that has all the latest security updates without having to recompile, upgrade, etc. When you reboot next, you have the same kernel you had last time you rebooted (unless you've done an upgrade in the meantime), so you know it's going to boot.

ksplice doesn't modify the kernel on-disk, only in memory. In the unlikely (so far for us) situation that one of those patches is incompatible, causes problems, crashes your system, etc. and you want to reboot to a known-good configuration, just log into their system and deactivate the server, and it won't be able to do any updates.

Your post seems to assume that ksplice changes your booting kernel, and thus who knows if it will boot next time. This doesn't happen. Unless you upgrade your kernel yourself (e.g. through yum or apt), you're always booting from the same (insecure) kernel, and the ksplice daemon reapplies the patches again after you boot to get you up-to-date.

It's really a marvellous technology, and it's worked very well for us so far.

malkia• 16 years ago

Cool. Correct me if I'm wrong, this is how I think the article describes it: - Stop the machine (one cpu running, the other ones are stopped). - Verify in all thread stacks whether the address range of the "C" function to be patched (begining to the end) to be patched is not referenced in the stack - e.g. if some function have to return to the said one (there might be false positives). - Put the new code in a free memory for execution. Change the first 5 bytes (x86) of the old function with JMP to the new function (granted the function should be at least 5 bytes).

Function changes that won't work: - Change to the function return type. - Change to the function argument list.

Things to be aware of: - If the same function is to be patched again, then you should check the stack for all pervious versions of the function (the stack might be in the old function, doing a JMP to a newer version that's doing another JMP to a newer function, etc.).

What else I might be missing?

Still don't know how they deal with data structures...

In Common Lisp, one can update CLOS objects, but these beasts are full of metadata, and only the compiler knows the inner parts.

Still quite interresting.

chwahoo3• 16 years ago

I believe changes to a function's return type and argument list should be supported. The caller of such a function would need to have been modified, so if the caller is also not "active" (on the callstack), then the update should be typesafe.

They do have limited support for type changes to data - e.g., adding a field to a struct. These must be performed using a "shadow data structure" which holds fields that were added to the original structure. This would cause patches to diverge a bit from the original kernel versions.

However, since Ksplice aims primarily to support security patches, I suspect that both function signature and type changes are less common than they would be for general OS (or application) evolution.

chwahoo3• 16 years ago

As a researcher in the area of runtime software upgrades, I'm excited to see this post here and am curious what the HN community thinks of Ksplice. Does your product demand extremely high availability with the further constraint that you can't just shift the workload to another machine to perform an OS (or application) upgrade? If so what are the circumstances? (e.g., Does your program maintain long-running connections that can't be broken?) Are there times when you have been unable to upgrade your OS or server program because you couldn't sacrifice availability?

I'd love to get in touch with people who are working under these constraints.

Get to know Ksplice: kernel patching was never this easy.

Related Stories