Re: RFC: new utility, kmodpatch

From: Ben Kaduk <minimarmot_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2009 19:19:12 -0500
On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Oliver Pinter <oliver.pntr_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Do You think for this project: http://www.ksplice.com/ ?
>
> On 1/1/09, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo_at_iet.unipi.it> wrote:
>> I mentioned this utility a couple of months ago, and it's now working
>> so i would like to receive feedback on whether this is good to have
>> as part of the system, or just keep it as a port (which is what
>> i plan to do by default).
>>
>> In a nutshell, the kmodpatch utility can print or alter the content
>> of device/quirk tables in kernel modules (I think Linux has some
>> similar tool, though i don't remember the name -- or perhaps it is
>> a feature of insmod ?).
>>


Ksplice is not yet in the linux kernel tree, so it's probably not
what Luigi was referring to.  However, it is a pretty impressive
piece of software, intended to apply security updates to a running
kernel with a "hot-patch" approach.  They give their latest status
update here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/5/330
I like that they have the goal of following the entire stable tree,
since it's not always clear which updates are security-related.

Their work is currently licensed under a GPLv2, and they haven't
thought very hard about whether they would be willing to relicense
with a BSD license.  (They're focusing their efforts on the Linux
kernel, for the moment.)

-Ben Kaduk

(disclaimer: the Ksplice developers are friends of mine, so
I heard most of this first-hand.)
Received on Thu Jan 01 2009 - 23:39:43 UTC

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