Since reboots are disruptive, many users and system administrators delay performing these updates, despite the greatly increased security risk--more than 90% of attacks exploit known vulnerabilities.

Some existing technologies protect the network by trying to identify malicious activity so that it can be stopped. Firewalls, network intrusion detection systems, and rootkit scanners are all concerned with the problem of identifying whether particular behavior is malicious. These systems all suffer from the same fundamental problem that attackers can always adjust their attacks to avoid detection. In contrast, Ksplice does not need to guess about whether particular activity is malicious; instead, Ksplice simply solves the underlying weakness in the system (by applying an update) so that no malicious activity, no matter how it has been disguised, will be able to achieve its objective of compromising the system.

Ksplice is the first practical technology for updating an operating system without rebooting; this work is based on recent award-winning research at MIT, and, to our knowledge, no other ongoing project has a similar goal of protecting the security and reliability of the network by making all operating system security updates seamless.

No one has previously managed to eliminate the need for security update reboots in a mainstream operating system. Many new and difficult technical problems are involved in this goal. The technical details of how Ksplice uses novel techniques to address these problems are described in detail in the Ksplice technical paper, available at

This project helps show how innovative free software can be: this technology will make a free operating system the first operating system in the world that does not require reboots for security updates.

Web Site : http://www.ksplice.com/

Country : United States

License : GPLv2

Leader of the Project : Jeff Arnold

Aimed Public : Ksplice is primarily intended to be used by system administrators who want to keep their machines secure and up-to-date without having to reboot. It is also useful for kernel hacking and debugging, as a quick way to try out new changes. However, Ksplice will also soon be relevant to end-users. We are going to start offering a rebootless update service on top of several Linux distributions. Users who opt-in to our service will no longer need to reboot for OS security updates--ever.

Specificity : No one else has managed to create a practical system for hot updates, either for the kernel or for userspace applications. Some academic research has been conducted in the area, but everything except Ksplice has been a proof-of-concept research system with limited applications -- nothing ready for production use.

Dependencies : Ksplice is new breakthrough technology, but it would not be possible without other free software projects. In particular, Ksplice requires the source code of the running Linux kernel to operate correctly. Ksplice also makes use of the GNU Binutils libbfd.

Want to contribute ?

The Ksplice developers are currently paying all of the expenses of Ksplice development themselves, so financial sponsorship of the project is particularly welcome.

Number of developers : 4

Number of contributors : 8

Public CVS/SVN : http://www.ksplice.com/git/ksp[..]