It’s a cool feature, and I played with it some, but I don’t really see how to use it in a home or small office environment unless you’re willing to subscribe to someone who can generate the live patches for you.
I can certainly generate the patches myself, but it’s much faster to let the maintainer of my distro’s kernel handle shipping new packages and accepting the reboot. My system reboots really quickly.
If high reliability is a concern, I would suggest load balancing or some other horizontally scaled solution such that you’re not impacted by one machine going down. Because they will go down for things other than updates!
Not rebooting for a long time makes me nervous once I actually reboot, as I might’ve changed something but didn’t make it persistent. Luckily I’ve become much better with documenting chabges after switching to NixOS.
It also means booting is untested until something like a hardware fault or a power outage forces it onto you and you have to deal with any reboot issues at the worst possible time and a time you did not choose.
There are some cases, where scaling is relatively hard to achieve in a sane manner. Especially when you’re in that weird place where you’ve grown out of the SME solutions, but can’t really justify the enterprise solution yet. I’ve worked on such a project, switching to the big boy DB cluster was pushed back again and again because of very high upfront costs (licenses and staff).
If you are using Ubuntu, they have live patch available. You have to sign up for Ubuntu Pro, but that is free for individuals. I just heard about this and haven’t tried it yet https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch
Mandatory link to one of the best suse parodies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRlTISvjww
Alternative links:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=SYRlTISvjww
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Wtf, guys, don’t be mean to the bot: they’re doing the job to the best of their ability. Besides, I’ve linked to farside that redirects to piped, and it’s kinda weird to expect the bot’s dev to know of all the possible redirecters (or whatever they’re called).
