Last year, several security vulnerabilities were discovered, making it difficult for system administrators to patch the systems without downtime quickly. What if some improvements can be made to update some critical components for security/performance improvements without rebooting a system?
Intel aims to achieve that with its new PFRUT (Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry) driver. Note that this is only possible with a Linux system and an Intel chip on board.
As I recall SUSE Linux (kGraft) and Ubuntu (Livepatch) have had similar patching of the kernel, and although they were not claiming 100% rebooting never required, they did not appear to be tied to a particular CPU architecture, like Intel is currently doing. Either ways, it looks like this functionality is improving across the board, and as it is all open source, it can be improved upon by others too. The Intel advantage though is that this goes into the general kernel, so non SUSE and Ubuntu users with Intel, all stand to gain from it.
See https://news.itsfoss.com/intel-linux-kernel/
#technology #Linux #Intel #livepatching #kernel #opensource