Oracle has bought the Ksplice company which offers services and technology for correcting vulnerabilities and errors in the Linux kernel on the fly. Oracle plans to incorporate the technology into its Unbreakable Linux kernel, as used by its "Unbreakable Linux", and expects this to increase the operating system's reliability, security and availability.
Ksplice originated at MIT and was introduced by Jeff Arnold in 2008. It works by first analysing a security patch and comparing it with the source code of the currently running kernel. It then creates a set of kernel modules to perform the update; these modules determine where the running kernel can be paused and, while paused, adds redirections to the new code where appropriate and then unpauses the kernel.

The link for this article located at H Security is no longer available.