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Comment by voidlogic | Hacker News Reader

The tragedy (from wikipedia):

On 21 July 2011, Oracle announced they acquired Ksplice, Inc. At the time the company was acquired, Ksplice, Inc. claimed to have over 700 companies using the service to protect over 100,000 servers. While the service had been available for multiple Linux distributions, it was stated at the time of acquisition that "Oracle believes it will be the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero downtime updates." More explicitly, "Oracle does not plan to support the use of Ksplice technology with Red Hat Enterprise Linux."[5] Existing legacy customers continue to be supported by Ksplice, but no new customers are being accepted for other platforms.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice

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Not exactly the case: Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian are supported for free, and RHEL for a fee:

Ksplice Uptrack is available for Oracle Linux, free of charge, for Oracle Linux customers with a Premier support subscription. Additionally, anyone can use Ksplice Uptrack for free on Ubuntu Desktop and Fedora.

http://www.ksplice.com/pricing

Thing is, while Oracle Linux is pretty much rebranded RHEL last time I checked, the KSplice commercial license won't let you use it with RHEL, and that won't be supported.

It is, you just have to buy an Oracle Premier Support License for your machine(s) and switch them from Red Hat to Oracle Linux (which requires switching yum repos, removing some packages, and installing a few others), but does not require a reboot - which means you can keep using the official Red Hat kernel (until you do reboot).

Disclaimer: I work there.

You forgot the part where you give Oracle your balls on a silver platter so they can hold them for you. We've all seen what Oracle likes to do with nice things.

Fairly sure Oracle Linux was at least in its initial incarnation a rebranded CentOS, which itself is of course a rebranded RHEL.

That "pricing" page is strangely devoid of pricing information.

EDIT: so, how much does it cost?

For Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian, nothing. For Oracle Linux, you need an Oracle support contract. Those don't come with a standard price tag.

Unfortunately, the website hasn't been fully updated since the acquisition, so there is some confusing verbiage. It's on my list (near the top, no less; sorry about the confusion).

I'm interested in CentOS.

I won't mince words, the cost of Ksplice these days is much higher than pre-acquisition, however you can get Ksplice for Enterprise Linux 5, 6 and 7, with the Redhat kernel without rebooting, as well as the Red Hat Compatible Kernel that Oracle recompiles, as well as Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) r1, r2 and r3.

https://www.ksplice.com/uptrack/supported-kernels

Note that since Oracle basically closed ksplice, RedHat has developed kpatch and SuSE has developed kgraft, which are both similar ways of doing the same kind of thing, and there is some discussion going on about whether they can be merged or a better general purpose kernel patching method developed: http://wiki.linuxplumbersconf.org/2014:live_kernel_patching

The Uptrack service was obviously proprietary, but the Ksplice software itself (everything to actually make and install the patches) was open source. There are plenty of mirrors on github: https://github.com/linux-kernel-live-patching/ksplice

But there's also kgraft and kpatch.

I thought they merged this in with their Oracle Linux

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/ksplice-datashee...

http://www.ksplice.com/uptrack/using

Red Hat is working on ksplice and SuSE on kGraft. And unlike Ksplice they try to merge it into the mainline kernel.

dont worry, no reboot updates are thing of the past thanks to systemd

Care to elaborate?

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