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[Steven Susbauer <question76818@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #76818 on Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/76818

    Status: Open => Answered

Steven Susbauer proposed the following answer:
ksplice is not free for everybody, just free for users to install in
their system. Also ksplice does not update everything, it is mostly
small security patches. ksplice is not at all affiliated with Ubuntu or
Canonical, which would make integrating it very difficult and even
dangerous for the distribution.

The process to create a system from scratch for inserting updates into
the kernel is non-trivial and not really supported from the kernel
developers, which in general most distributions try not to move too far
from vanilla. Creating the actual updates themselves is also a possibly
time consuming process (especially testing them). The updates installed
by ksplice (and theoretically some homebrew service) are not actually
pressed into a kernel, that is to say at reboot the updates are not
applied until the ksplice service and modules are loaded again, this can
affect performance negatively. Windows supports a very similar
technology, but Microsoft does not use it and forces reboots for many of
the same reasons.

It is a great product and neat technology but will probably be a while
before it is actually integrated into a distribution, if ever. It is
very well suited for servers where uptime is a huge issue and admins
still want security updates, but for the general desktop user it is not
really worth the overhead and rebooting is not that huge of an issue. I
think the largest thing to expect is maybe getting it into the
repositories for users to download from there.

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