Linux Kernel Live Patching
summary
Describes a practical live kernel-patching pipeline that replaces whole functions at runtime so reboots are unnecessary, using ftrace for dynamic trampolines, stop_machine to serialize CPU state and a kpatch-style builder that emits patch modules; it walks every thread stack to ensure no patched function is active, supports shadow-variables for structure changes, and demonstrates fixing a cgroup/container exhaustion bug so systems overcome a ~65,000-container failure without reboot.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Linux kernel live patching
- 1:27Live bug fixing necessity
- 5:26Tracing kernel functions with Ftrace
- 10:38Dynamic backtrace and online patching
- 13:54Security checks before patching
- 17:07Generating live patch modules
- 21:03Live patching in containers
- 26:51Limitations and unsupported cases
- 28:58Q&A
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