Hi, On 02/14/2017 12:58 AM, Daniel Bareiro wrote: > Some time ago I read that Linux 4.x incorporates the feature to be > updated without requiring a restart of the operating system.
They incorporated parts of that. There are still some unsolved issues. See for example this article from last November about the topic: https://lwn.net/Articles/706327/ So there's no complete upstream support for this yet, there are several distributions that roll their own variants. > Since stretch incorporates a kernel of the 4.x series, this would imply > that we can update the kernel package and avoid reboots? No. There are two components to this: 1. The kernel must support loading live patches This is partially true for the kernel that will come with Stretch (CONFIG_LIVEPATCH=y), but (see the LWN article I linked) it doesn't actually work safely yet. 2. Someone needs to prepare the live patches. Currently nobody in Debian is doing that. You could do it yourself with the right tooling (look at kpatch and kgraft), but preparing these kinds of patches is very complicated. (And that still doesn't solve the problem that the current patch loading support is unsafe, see 1.) Further reading: https://lists.debian.org/1460472961.25201.200.ca...@decadent.org.uk Depending on whether there is movement in the upstream kernel there is a chance this might be a thing in Buster, but it definitely won't work out of the box in Stretch. You'll still need to reboot. Regards, Christian
