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Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers can now shift their licenses from on-premise gear up into Google's cloud as well as Amazon's. The new licensing option was announced by Google and Red Hat on Monday alongside the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google's Amazon-killing "Cloud Platform". RHEL had been available in a "preview" mode since Compute Engine went into general availability in December 2013. With the news, RHEL will be available to customers in both an on-demand consumption model and via a "Red Hat Cloud Access" option which lets companies "migrate their current [RHEL] subscriptions for use on Google Cloud Platform." To give punters this option, Google has joined the "Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program", which means the company has met the "testing and certification requirements to demonstrate that they can deliver a safe, scalable, supported and consistent environment for enterprise cloud deployments," Red Hat wrote in a release. The RHEL software served up on Google's cloud platform differs from typical installations, Google explains, by incorporating Google's Compute Engine tools gcutil, gsutil, and gcimagebundle, enabling SELinux by default, allowing inbound SSH access through the RHEL firewall, augmenting rsyslog, and other tweaks. RHEL cloud servers cost extra. Google charges $0.06 per hour for the RHEL software on servers of less than eight virtual cores and $0.13 per hour on servers with more, along with the base server fee. Until today it was only possible for punters to shift their on-premise licenses up into cloud king Amazon Web Services. The new choice of suppliers is likely to be welcomed, especially since Amazon and Google are locked in a price war with each other. ® Source

A collaboration between SUSE and Red Hat is going to bring relief to Linux users the world over: they'll be able to patch their systems without reboots. The live patching infrastructure looks set to become available in version 3.20 of the Linux kernel. The two organisations introduced their distribution-specific live patching solutions a month apart in 2013 – SUSE's kGraft hit in February, and Red Hat's Kpatch arrived in March. As SUSE developer Jiri Kosina explains on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, an early shot at live patching called kSplice was acquired and turned into a proprietary service. He says the SUSE and Red Hat approaches were different: “kPatch is issuing stop_machine()”, inspecting processes and deciding whether the system is safe to patch; “kGraft provides a per-thread consistency during one single pass of a process through the kernel and performs a lazy contiguous migration of threads from 'unpatched' universe to the 'patched' one at safe checkpoints.” After a discussion at the Linux Plumbers' Conference in Dusseldorf in 2014, the different parties worked out the basis of the new approach. A key aspect of the live-patching infrastructure, Kosina says, is that it's “self-contained, in a sense that it doesn't hook itself in any other kernel subsystem (it doesn't even touch any other code). “It's now implemented for x86 only as a reference architecture, but support for powerpc, s390 and arm is already in the works (adding arch-specific support basically boils down to teaching ftrace about regs-saving)”, he continues. Red Hat and SUSE will port their current solutions to the common infrastructure, “abandoning their out-of-tree code”. Kosina's post to the list is addressed to "Linus" and says "Live patching core is available for you to pull at git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/livepatching.git for-linus. Over to you, Mr Torvalds. ® Source