Michael Ellerman, a Linux kernel developer working for IBM, has recently reported that a group of engineers from IBM and SUSE managed to enable kernel live patching support for the PPC64le hardware architecture.
The PPC64le instruction set architecture is a pure little-endian mode of the PPC64 (PowerPC 64-bit) platform, and it has been introduced along with the POWER8 family of superscalar symmetric multiprocessors, as a prime target for the technologies produced by OpenPOWER.
During the development cycle of the recently released Linux 4.6 kernel, the skilled IBM and SUSE developers put all the puzzle piece together and managed to get the kernel live patching feature to work for this architecture, but it looks like it didn’t officially make it into the stable Linux kernel 4.6 release.
Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/kernel-live-patching-for-64-bit-ibm-power8-machines-coming-in-linux-4-7-504541.shtml
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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