Ksplice Uptrack: No More Rebooting?

by Joe Brockmeier - Feb. 10, 2010Comments (0)

Ksplice Logo

Do you dread kernel updates because they mean having to reboot the system? Not any more, at least for those willing to subscribe to a new service from Ksplice. The company is now offering a service called Uptrack that promises to allow kernel updates from Linux vendors without any need to reboot.

Rebooting hundreds of servers can be quite a hassle, especially since many customers don't like to see downtime during business hours — meaning that admin staff often have to schedule time after hours to perform kernel updates. So Ksplice is offering to solve that with Uptrack by performing a "hot" update of the kernel and applying security updates to the kernel while it's running. The software has been in development for quite some time, but this is the first offering of a subscription service.

It works with stock versions of the vendor kernel, so systems getting updates from Uptrack should be more or less identical to systems doing regular updates, though the technology doesn't change the version of the kernel reported when using uname, so it might run into problems over time with any application that checks the kernel version number. It works on x86 and x86-64 systems, and should work fine with virtualized Linux systems as well, but Linux users on PowerPC or other architectures still have to deal with reboots.

The only downside to Ksplice is the cost. The pricing is just under four dollars a month per system, or nearly $50 a year per system. That can turn into real money pretty quickly for companies with hundreds or thousands of servers. It also gives companies two points of contact for updates, which can be a bit of a pain. Whether the pain is enough to motivate companies into deploying Ksplice Uptrack is the question. If it catches on, I'd put even money on the company being acquired by the beginning of 2011.

The software, or most of the pieces, is available under the GPLv2, so enterprising distributions could also provide this for their users if they have developers willing to create the patches as well as package the Ksplice utilities. In an interview last year Waseem Daher, the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ksplice, said that the company is trying to get the technology into the mainline kernel and is happy to work with the community on Ksplice.

Ksplice is offering a free trial of the service for one month, and free version of Uptime for Ubuntu users — but read the fine print before you get too excited. The FAQ only promises free updates to Ubuterinos for as long as Karmic is the newest version of Ubuntu. The company is also supporting Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS.