Bringing the world reboot-less updates
It’s an annoyance for the individual computer user: You’ve updated your operating system, and now you need to reboot. This is so the computer can switch to the modified source code.Imagine, however, having to update and reboot hundreds or thousands of computers operating in large companies and organizations: It can have a significant impact in lost time and money as computers and online services shut down, sometimes for hours. To avoid downtime, organizations will usually wait for low-traffic periods to update — but this can leave the servers outdated or vulnerable to cyber attacks. In 2008, Jeff Arnold ’07, MEng ’08, along with a team of MIT computer scientists and engineers, began solving this issue by developing and commercializing software, called Ksplice, that automatically applies patches (security updates or bug fixes) to an operating system, on the fly, without requiring a reboot.Based on Arnold’s award-winning MIT master’s thesis, the novel...