UPDATE UBUNTU 16.04 LTS LINUX KERNEL WITHOUT REBOOTING
Canonical launched the Canonical Livepatch Service recently, an “authenticated, encrypted, signed stream of livepatch kernel modules for Ubuntu servers, virtual machines and desktops“, applying critical security and vulnerability patches without requiring a reboot.
The new service is commercial (commercial support subscriptions start at $12 / month), but it’s offered for free to the Ubuntu community, for up to 3 systems.
Any Ubuntu user can enable the new Canonical Livepatch Service for free, on 3 systems running a 64bit Ubuntu 16.04 LTS machine.
It does not work with other Ubuntu versions, 32bit Ubuntu systems, or if you’re using a custom kernel!
To use it, firstly make sure you’re running snapd version 2.15 or newer (to make sure you have the latest version, you can use Software Updater or just run “sudo apt update” and “sudo apt install snapd”). If you’re using an older version, you’ll encounter an issue and canonical-livepatch will fail to start (this occurred on my system but I don’t remember the exact error message).