[CentOS-devel] ksplice and CentOS

[Karanbir Singh]

On 11/19/2011 01:09 PM, Andreas Balg wrote:
> I remember Karan got the ksplice-code in order to be able to fork this
> great technology for CentOS and not let got Oracle all alone with this.

There have been issues..

> So what happened the last weeks/months regarding this great idea ? I‘d

1) Corey has been doing some work on this - we managed to get a couple
of test patches rolled into modules, ship them over and keep the
machines going - but being able to do that for the large patches coming
from RH has been very hard - not the least because neither Corey nor I
have enough kernel development foo to keep things moving forward. The
merged patch from RH does not help at all.

2) The tool chain published by ksplice/oracle is incomplete. There are
atleast 3 efforts, that I know about, to chase them up to get the
complete toolchain released ( and this is the one that they *are* using
and shipping at the moment, still with GPL license code. So join the
effort : signup a fedora machine or an ubuntu  machine, get their free
stack on there, then ask for the source. Document the process, blog
about it and canvas for local support. It would help.

3) There might be other, better ways of achieving the same result -
atleast one of which has prior art going back into the late 1960's - but
between both of the us, it again boils down to time/resource and kernel
development foo.

Finally, there have been pressures on various fronts keeping us from
working on this much further. We also noticed that there was and is very
little interest in ksplice itself. While it sounds really cool  very few
people really need something of this nature. And given that you cant
really just keep patching, all the time, all kinds of patches - the idea
that your machine will stay online 24/7 is a bit of mis-selling really.

> personally and professionally be interested in using it for our
> deployments but also to contribute where possible – we have no
> kernel-development knowledge here to help out but maybe we can help in
> other ways as well.

Absolutely!

> Is there already any project fort he fork going on or did the idea die
> or sleep silently the last few weeks ??

things have been ticking along, slowly, in the background. If there is
enough interest and if we can get a few people involved in there with
the require skills - we should have a chat about it, split up the tasks
and all of us go away do something about those tasks. Having said that,
I am still quite keen to see oracle/ksplice actually release their code.

> Curious greetings from switzerland,

Hello from a surprisingly sunny London!

- KB