This release has many fixes and improvements since 0.3.4. The '0.3' was
bumped to '0.4' because of commit 0bb5c106ef ("kmod: restructure
kpatch sysfs tree"), which broke the ABI between the kpatch core module
and the kpatch script, as it changed the sysfs layout.
Other notable changes since 0.3.4:
- The tools underlying kpatch-build have been made more modular, in
preparation for making create-diff-object more generally useful to
other use cases (kernel livepatch, Xen live patching, user space
patching).
- Support for all new upstream kernels up to 4.10.
- KASLR support.
- Many other bug fixes and improvements.
Remove the dracut support for adding the kpatch modules to the
initramfs. This creates a sizeable delay in installation time and
doesn't offer any added protect over just applying the patches at boot
time using a systemd service. Additional, we are seeing more platforms,
namely atomic and netboot environments, where changing the initramfs
can't be done.
Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings <sjenning@redhat.com>
On RHEL I'm seeing issues with putting the core module in the "extra"
path. On the next depmod run, it gets added to modules.dep, and on a
subsequent kpatch install I see the following errors:
/usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/50drm/module-setup.sh: line 26: /lib/modules/3.10.0-123.4.4.el7.x86_64//weak-updates/kpatch/kpatch.ko: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/90kernel-modules/module-setup.sh: line 14: /lib/modules/3.10.0-123.4.4.el7.x86_64//weak-updates/kpatch/kpatch.ko: No such file or directory
modinfo: ERROR: Module /lib/modules/3.10.0-123.4.4.el7.x86_64/weak-updates/kpatch/kpatch.ko not found.
Until the core module gets merged into Linux, I think we can put it in
/usr/lib/kpatch, which is also where the patch modules are going to be
delivered in the RHEL RPM.
Making sure the other options still work with the kpatch utility for
now, so as to keep backwards compatibility between a newer kpatch
utility and older core modules. We can break this compatibility for
kpatch 0.2.0.
