Oracle acquires Ksplice

[Posted July 21, 2011 by corbet]

Ksplice is a mechanism for applying patches to running kernels without the need to bring the system down; LWN covered it back in 2008. Now the company that was built around this technology has been acquired by Oracle, which plans to offer the service with its enterprise distribution. "The addition of Ksplice's technology will increase the security, reliability and availability of Oracle Linux by enabling customers to apply security updates, diagnostics patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting."

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Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 21, 2011 22:45 UTC (Thu) by bartn (subscriber, #62982) [Link]

Please note that existing customers received an email from the former CEO of Ksplice stating the following:

"The Ksplice Uptrack service is planned to be included as a standard part of Oracle Linux Premier Support, and we will no longer be selling the service separately to new customers moving forward. As an existing Ksplice customer, you may continue to renew your subscriptions and add additional systems to your account as before [...]"

No mention is being made of the continuation of the free service currently being offered to people running Ubuntu or Fedora. But future availability of this wonderful service for non-Oracle-customers looks very bleak.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 21, 2011 23:21 UTC (Thu) by mother (guest, #77201) [Link]

A truly awful day for the linux ecosystem and sysadmins.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 21, 2011 23:44 UTC (Thu) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link]

> A truly awful day for the linux ecosystem and sysadmins.

Eh, this isn't as big of a deal as it seems. People that need ksplice need high availability. Most high availability is provided by clusters. Meaning rolling outages behind a load balancer or some other technology.

Truth is, keeping a single machine up for long periods of time just isn't as valuable as it once was. ksplice has several good use cases, don't get me wrong, but I don't see it ever getting mass/general purpose adoption.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 21, 2011 23:52 UTC (Thu) by littlesandra88 (guest, #64017) [Link]

I view it as useful for the switch and router space. General purpose OS has too much complexity, surface area and state to work well IMHO.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 0:51 UTC (Fri) by selb (guest, #70280) [Link]

It's great for things like OpenVZ (shared-kernel virtualization) servers, where there might be many customers' virtual machines on a single physical server that you either have to reboot all at once with no hope of coordinating a time that works perfectly for everyone, which sucks for the customer, or never apply security updates, which sucks for everyone involved. Ksplice was a great solution to this problem.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 1:01 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

for systems like that you need to be able to snapshot the instances and move them to another server and restart them.

without that, you are just trying to paper over your single-point-of-failure

nothing says that they all have to be moved at the same time (you do have the capacity to survive a system failure don't you? this is just a planned system failure)

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 1:16 UTC (Fri) by mother (guest, #77201) [Link]

So you always immediately reboot when a new kernel is out, like within minutes?

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 2:33 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

no more than you immediately apply an untried patch to a running kernel with ksplice

in any case, you need to test the kernel or patch to see if it causes other grief for you.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 1:24 UTC (Fri) by selb (guest, #70280) [Link]

Oh, I certainly agree that it's just papering over other problems, but in the budget OpenVZ hosting space, having a single point of failure is a fact of life as a way to reduce costs and stay competitive, and the burden is on the customer to be able to survive failure.

Note that I'm speaking only as an occasional customer of such services; sometimes it's worth the overall sliminess and subpar guarantees to get a VPS as cheap as a budget OpenVZ one for a hobby project.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 2:12 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

if a company is cutting costs to the point where they have no capacity to handle a server failing, what makes you think that they will pay for something like ksplice to paper over the problem?

OpenVZ checkpointing and live migration

Posted Jul 22, 2011 4:56 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

OpenVZ has had checkpointing for over four years now. Checkpointing is what makes it easy to do either an offline or an online (live) migration of a container from one physical host to another. You just need to have an extra host or two to migrate your containers to so you can upgrade the primary machine, reboot it, and then migrate the containers back.

Live migration actually works quite well when the source and destination physical hosts are running very similar kernels. They don't have to exactly match, but they should be close.

In cases where they aren't close enough, offline migration allows you to migrate with a minimal amount of downtime... usually less than 30 seconds... depending on how long it takes your container's processes to start.

OpenVZ checkpointing and live migration

Posted Jul 24, 2011 0:19 UTC (Sun) by kolyshkin (guest, #34342) [Link]

I'd like to add that we maintain older-to-newer kernel compatibility, at least for stable kernel versions, so you can always migrate from A to B if A <= B.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 1:15 UTC (Fri) by mother (guest, #77201) [Link]

It doesn't have several good use cases on RHEL any more.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 10:05 UTC (Fri) by jsanders (subscriber, #69784) [Link]

We use it for desktop machines in the sciences, running fedora. It's pretty hard to keep rebooting desktops when people are doing longish running jobs interactively.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 0:56 UTC (Fri) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

A lot of the projects that Oracle have acquired are doing fine; or at least their forks are.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 3:20 UTC (Fri) by cjb (guest, #40354) [Link]

> A lot of the projects that Oracle have acquired are doing fine; or at least their forks are.

Indeed. This time the forking situation is even worse -- it looks like http://www.ksplice.com/software disappeared today, after previously hosting their (two year old) open source server release.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 11:17 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

As mentioned on the Wikipedia page of Ksplice:

http://knoppix.mirrors.tds.net/pub/linux/frugalware/fruga...

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 8:26 UTC (Fri) by DYN_DaTa (guest, #34072) [Link]

Cry me a river.

Patent situation better or worse.

Posted Jul 22, 2011 7:12 UTC (Fri) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]

AFAIK MS has a patent on something similar as KSplice. My guess is that Oracle and MS won't sue each other because they have so many patents that it makes no sense.

IANAL but my guess is that now that Oracle owns Ksplice distros should have an easier time defending against the MS patent in court.(Totally uneducated guess, I know patent law suits are very complex and seem fairly random.)

Any thoughts?

Patent situation better or worse.

Posted Jul 22, 2011 11:18 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

I heared those patents have already been debunked because of prior-art.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 7:50 UTC (Fri) by rilder (guest, #59804) [Link]

Just curious, was it profitable -- the Ksplice service. It is quite an interesting technique to ensure rebootless updates. I wonder if this will continue to be as open as before after this acquisition or will it enter as a drop into the enterprise ocean of Oracle.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 17:53 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

it sounds as if they've already shut down the open portions. they've also said that existing customers can continue to receive service and renew contracts, but all new customers have to get this as part of a Oracle support agreement.

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 22, 2011 18:57 UTC (Fri) by darnaut (subscriber, #62995) [Link]

"You can (continue to) try ksplice for free on ubuntu and fedora : http://t.co/Ms8hfm4 and http://t.co/SqNwZhv."

https://twitter.com/#!/wimcoekaerts/status/94463565330792449

Oracle acquires Ksplice

Posted Jul 26, 2011 15:47 UTC (Tue) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]

Please use real URLs that can be easily read without clicking on them. At minimum provide good anchor text identifying where the links are going to.