Canonical has made its Livepatch service available for ARM64 systems on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 26. The update allows kernel patches without requiring a reboot.
Canonical's Livepatch can now patch the Linux kernel on ARM64 systems without forcing a reboot. This capability has been available on AMD64 machines for years.
Work on the feature began in 2023 with a gap analysis that identified missing support for reliable stacktraces in the upstream ARM64 kernel. The compiler toolchain, including GCC, objdump and kpatch, also lacked stable ARM64 support at the time.
By late February the ARM64 Livepatch client was applying patches in Canonical's test environments. The service forms part of Ubuntu Pro and remains free for personal use on up to five machines.
Livepatch addresses critical and high-severity kernel vulnerabilities in memory. Canonical still recommends occasional reboots to manage memory leaks and other state issues that live patching cannot resolve.
