This article talks about Ksplice, a program developed by an MIT grad student to perform security updates on a Linux server without having to reboot it:

The technology was developed by cofounder Jeff Arnold while he was a graduate student at MIT, and last week, it won the grand prize at the Institute's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Waseem Daher, cofounder and chief operating officer, explains that the approach adopted by Ksplice saves it from restructuring instructions in a higher-level programming language on the fly. So far, Ksplice has developed its new update technology for the Linux operating system--which is commonly used to control server machines--although Daher says that the technology could work on other operating systems too.

In my experience, it's not necessary to reboot a Linux server unless you're doing a kernel update or some change to a filesystem. Do you see any purpose for this?

Waseem Daher, cofounder and chief operating officer, explains that the approach adopted by Ksplice saves it from restructuring instructions in a higher-level programming language on the fly. So far, Ksplice has developed its new update technology for the Linux operating system--which is commonly used to control server machines--although Daher says that the technology could work on other operating systems too.

Ksplice is intended to work for all security patches. "If you don't have a complete solution, it's basically useless," Daher says.

The link for this article located at Technology Review is no longer available.