I wonder if we should just universally accept that live patching should become part of the linux kernel? An automatic job that updates (much like some system packages in some distros) that installs (signed) live patches from upstream? Of course we would run into a problem where a malicious patch can now be distributed reliably to hundreds of thousands of machines, but we already have that at a lower level with normal application updates.

Canonical has thus far proved that it can be safe, but they're also a massive organization that is locking this feature for $200/yr for any commercial use.

It would be neat if such patches could retroactively replace tagged functions that have identical sematics so that means it would automatically get backported without extra effort from the maintainers.