LIve (Kernel) Patching: future development

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Refereed Presentation
Scheduled: Thursday, September 14, 2017 from 11:00 – 11:45am in Platinum D

One Line Summary

The purpose of this talk is to describe status quo of the Live Kernel Patching implementation and identify future steps needed to improve the implementation

Abstract

Live Kernel Patching is currently present in Linus’ tree in a shape that basically covers the most crucial features of “vendor specific” implementations (SUSE’s kGraft, RedHat’s kpatch, …). Therefore it’s time to look forward and identify where the next biggest challenges are.

The topics of special interest:

- Extending the set of supported architectures, with one of the necessary preparatory steps being implementing reliable stack traces for every given architecture

- Possibilities of applying live patches that change data structures / layout are currently very limited. There are ideas how to fix this (load hooks, shadow data structures, etc.), but this requires more research and actual implementation.

- Userspace patch creation tooling is currently rather crude, imposing a lot of manual work on the patch creator, leaving a lot of possibilities for toolchain automation.

- Extending the idea of live patching to cover userspace processess as well

The purpose of this talk is to identify and describe those coming challenges, and ideally provoke enough interest in the audience to eventually extend the developer (and user) community.

Audio

Tags

live kernel patching, kpatch, kgraft, live patching, KLP

Presentation Materials

slides

Speaker

  • Biography

    Jiri works as a Linux Kernel developer and a leader of the “Core Kernel” team at SUSE Labs.