[tor-dev] Dynamically updating tor

[Sebastian Hahn]

Hi list,

I recently played with the Kitsune[0] framework to figure out whether we
might be able to use it to dynamically update (that is, perform an
update without restarting the process) Tor relays on Linux. This post is
just to make you aware such a thing has been attempted. I deem it
currently infeasible due to the high overhead (in developer time) and
the lack of confidence in the resulting update binaries. Nevertheless,
people might want to take a look. I have not cleaned this up at all and
it is quite dependent on the software currently available in Debian
jessie, including the versions of OpenSSL and libevent.

In short, THIS WILL NOT WORK FOR YOU UNLESS YOU ARE VERY LUCKY AND
ARE PREPARED TO SPEND SIGNIFICANT TIME WITH IT. THIS IS NOT RELEASE
QUALITY CODE BY A LONG SHOT.

The Tor code is in a branch[1] in my tor repo and there's a tarball[2]
of the modifications I had to make to Kitsune to enable building it with
a newer version of one of its dependencies. This is a generally exciting
topic imo, but I currently have no intentions to keep pursuing this
angle more because of other commitments and due to the fact that I think
it is unrealistic to expect the Tor developers to learn this tool. If
there is serious interest both in improving Kitsune as well as dynamic
updatability support for Tor, I might reconsider in the future.

Cheers and have fun
Sebastian

[0]: http://kitsune-dsu.com / https://github.com/kitsune-dsu/kitsune-core
[1]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/sebastian/tor.git/log/?h=dsu
[2]: https://people.torproject.org/~sebastian/kitsune-core.tar.gz