tl;dr: you can use kexec to stage a kernel upgrade in-memory without the need for a full reboot. Your system will reload the new kernel on the fly and activate it. There will be a service restart of every running service as the new kernel is loaded, but you skip the entire bootloader & hardware initialization.

By using kexec you can upgrade your running Linux machine’s kernel without a full reboot. Keep in mind, there’s still a new kernel load, but it’s significantly faster than doing the whole bootloader stage and hardware initialization phase performed by the system firmware (BIOS or UEFI).

Yes, calling this kernel upgrades without reboots is a vast exaggeration. You skip parts of the reboot, though, usually the slowest parts.

Installing kexec

On a CentOS 7 machine the kexec tools should be installed by default, but just in case they aren’t;

$ yum install kexec-tools

After that, the kexec binary should be available to you.

Install your new kernel

In this example I’ll upgrade a rather old CentOS 7 kernel to the latest.

$ uname -r 3.10.0-229.14.1.el7

So I’m now running the 3.10.0-229.14.1.el7 kernel.

To upgrade your kernel, first install the latest kernel packages.

$ yum update kernel ... =================================================================================== Package Arch Version Repository Size =================================================================================== Installing: kernel x86_64 3.10.0-514.6.1.el7 updates 37 M

This will install the

3.10.0-514.6.1.el7

kernel on my machine.

So a quick summary (on new lines, so you see the kernel version difference):

From: 3.10.0-229.14.1.el7 To: 3.10.0-514.6.1.el7 $ rpm -qa | grep kernel | sort kernel-3.10.0-229.14.1.el7.x86_64 kernel-3.10.0-514.6.1.el7.x86_64

Once you installed the new kernel, it’s time for the kexec in-memory upgrading magic.

In-memory kernel upgrade with kexec

As a safety command, unload any previously attempted kernels first. This is harmless and will make sure you start “cleanly” with your upgrade process.

$ kexec -u

Now, state the new kernel to be loaded. Note these are the version numbers of the latest installed kernel with yum , as shown above.

$ kexec -l /boot/vmlinuz-3.10.0-514.6.1.el7.x86_64 \ --initrd=/boot/initramfs-3.10.0-514.6.1.el7.x86_64.img \ --reuse-cmdline

Careful: next command will reload a new kernel and will impact running services!

Once prepared, start kexec.

$ systemctl kexec

Your system will freeze for a couple of seconds, load the new kernel and be good to go.

Some benchmarks

A very quick and unscientific benchmark of doing a yum update kernel with and without kexec .

Normal way, kernel upgrade + reboot: 28s Kexec way, kernel upgrade + reload: 19s

So you have a couple of seconds of the new kernel load, for big physical machines with lots of RAM, this will be even more as the entire POST check can be skipped with this method.

Here’s a side-by-side run of the same kernel update. On the left: the kexec flow you’ve read above. On the right, a classic yum update kernel && reboot .

[https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0-dPoS5VJgw]

Notice how the left VM never goes into the BIOS or POST checks.

If you’re going to be automating these updates, have a look at some existing scripts to help you going: kexec-reboot, ArchWiki on kexec.