Fedora 22 is among the first OSes to get Linux kernel 4.0

Apr 20, 2015 04:07 GMT  ·  By

Our Easter present this year from Linus Torvalds was Linux kernel 4.0, a release that brought the new Linux kernel patching infrastructure everyone talks about these days. Also known as live patching, the new functionality won't require users to reboot their systems each time the kernel packages were updated.

Linux kernel 4.0 is now one of the most wanted features by Linux users. As such, two of the most popular distributions of GNU/Linux in the world, Ubuntu and Fedora, have already announced their plans for inclusion of Linux 4.0 kernel in their upcoming releases, more precisely Ubuntu 15.10 and Fedora 22.

Fedora Linux is probably the first distro to offer the Linux kernel 4.0 packages to its users via the official software repositories of the current development release, Fedora 22 Alpha, today. Unfortunately, the Linux 4.0 kernel's number one feature, live patching, is not enabled by default in Fedora Linux and it might never be.

A lot of Fedora Linux users are disappointed right now

When some Google+ users asked the Fedora developers if they plan on offering kernel upgrades without a reboot, Josh Boyer, the Fedora kernel team leader, replied that there are no plans to enable live patching in Fedora 22's Linux kernel 4.0 packages.

"In reality, we might not ever really leverage the live patching functionality in Fedora itself," says Josh Boyer. "It is understandable that people want to patch their kernel without rebooting, but the mechanism is mostly targeted at small bugfixes and security patches. You cannot, for example, live patch from version 4.0 to 4.1."

As a result, a lot of Fedora users are disappointed right now, but if they read Josh Boyer's blog post from beginning to the end, they will (probably) understand why this decision was taken for the time being to disable live patching in the Linux kernel 4.0 packages for Fedora 22.