Re: A system for rebootless kernel security updates

Jeff Arnold wrote:

> I've put together an automatic system for applying kernel security patches 
> to the Linux kernel without rebooting it, and I wanted to share this 
> system with the community in case others find it useful or interesting.

Hmm, the idea seem to be patented by Microsoft, i.e. this patent from 
December 2002:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=cVyWAAAAEBAJ&dq=hotp...

(and other patents by Microsoft if you search for "hotpatching").


And those patent descriptions, by the way, remind the way kexec works 
("A software module is hotpatched by loading a patch into memory and 
modifying an instruction in the original module to jump to the patch"), 
which was released much earlier... In essence, they patented kexec ;)


-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org