Introducing PMR, a Tool Using procfs, systemd, and cgroups to Perform Minimum-Impact daemon and Library Updates
LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.
The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.
David Strauss, Pantheon
As we distribute security information and updates ever-faster, administrators must respond quickly to minimize vulnerability and downtime. But, those are often in conflict because it's hard to identify a more careful way to apply an update than rebooting entire servers.
Fortunately, modern Linux kernels show which executables and libraries are loaded into which running process IDs. systemd uses cgroups to track which process IDs belong to which services. Combined, it's possible to identify exactly what services require restarting or reloading after installing updates to files on disk.
A free, open-source tool called PMR (""The Process Maps Restarter"") [https://github.com/pantheon-systems/pmr] automates the demonstrated technique.
David Strauss, Pantheon
If you’ve ever deployed an enterprise website, chances are you’ve benefited from one of the tools David's developed. After co-founding Four Kitchens, a successful web development shop, David found himself gravitating away from custom client work and toward infrastructure solutions. Large clients like Creative Commons, Internet Archive, The Economist, and Wikimedia had already benefited from his scalability and database optimization work. Now, his focus is Pantheon, where he's building an infrastructure to support developers and organizations through building, testing, and deploying content management sites.
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author = {David Strauss},
title = {Introducing {PMR}, a Tool Using procfs, systemd, and cgroups to Perform {Minimum-Impact} daemon and Library Updates},
year = {2014},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}
