[pert]

I am a Linux sysadmin for a large company and I can say, without any hesitation, that we would love this! In our case, there aren't _that_ many systems that "absolutely cannot be rebooted" but scheduling a reboot on any system does take significant time and effort.

Why don't you think that the Linux vendors won't support this? I can see it taking some time to be introduced, but there'll be a lot of corporate customers out there who would be interested in this and, as long as the process of generating a new patch doesn't take too long, I can't see any reason why this process can't be used by the commercial Linux vendors.

[moe]

There is just no benefit to this. Even with ksplice you still have to schedule a downtime for each update because any problems due to a bad patch (or, behold, ksplice bug) would cause an unplanned downtime otherwise.

And as grant-parent said, reboots for kernel-updates are a non-issue in larger deployments anyways. If a simple reboot gives you headache then please ask yourself what happens when (not if!) the hardware on that host fails?