this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Full system updates without a reboot? Sign me up.
Also sounds like we can run multiple kernels at once during normal operations, to isolate processes.
So, could I run a second kernel for, say, Docker to use? Isolate those containers away from the host system kernel?
Linux subsystem for linux
You know the very first thing someone is going to do is run Linux in Linux in Linux.
I thought the first would be Doom :(
This truly is God's country
Keep you imaginary sky daddy out of here, thank you
Just a figure of speech 😉
This is already possible with kpatch, ksplice, etc. This new thing seems more like a hypervisor of sorts? Or maybe a next level docker where containers could package their own kernel?
In-memory kernel patching is complicated, AFAIK only select distributions support it, right? If kernel hotswap is successfully implemented this way, it should allow switching between arbitrary kernels at runtime without extra work or setup.
Of course, that's a pretty big "if", but a simple unified system sounds like a great thing. And of course there's more to this than swapping kernels.
Not necessarily, maybe the main kernel has to keep running so you won't be able to hot swap that (haven't read the thing yet). In any case we've had updates without reboot for a while for a while, but it's a pain to set up, there's even a song about it https://youtu.be/SYRlTISvjww