If you are using Ubuntu, they have live patch available. You have to sign up for Ubuntu Pro, but that is free for individuals. I just heard about this and haven’t tried it yet ubuntu.com/security/livepatch
I can see this being useful for NixOS. It’s still a glimmer in the postman’s eye, and we’re WAITING for systemd src to come with certain options to make the attaching and reattaching of systemd easier.
But I could easily see nixpkgs implement functions that allow nixos-rebuild switch to use either live patching method, or even implementing one specifically for NixOS.
This would be twice as neat, because switch is already magical in how it shifts from one system to another. If you could then also live patch the kernel? It just adds another super power.
It’s a cool feature, and I played with it some, but I don’t really see how to use it in a home or small office environment unless you’re willing to subscribe to someone who can generate the live patches for you.
I can certainly generate the patches myself, but it’s much faster to let the maintainer of my distro’s kernel handle shipping new packages and accepting the reboot. My system reboots really quickly.
If high reliability is a concern, I would suggest load balancing or some other horizontally scaled solution such that you’re not impacted by one machine going down. Because they will go down for things other than updates!
Not rebooting for a long time makes me nervous once I actually reboot, as I might’ve changed something but didn’t make it persistent. Luckily I’ve become much better with documenting chabges after switching to NixOS.
It also means booting is untested until something like a hardware fault or a power outage forces it onto you and you have to deal with any reboot issues at the worst possible time and a time you did not choose.
Add comment