On Mar 31, 2004, at 6:42 AM, Steve Underwood wrote:
Scott Laird wrote:
You can buy systems with hot-plugable standard PCI slots. Many higher-end servers have included the ability for years.

Example: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantml530/index.html

If you read down far enough, it mentions that the PCI-X slots are hot-pluggable. Linux has kernel support for the HP/COMPAQ/IBM hot-plug chips, but I'm pretty sure that you still need a bit of driver support.

I haven't tried with a recent Compaq, but a couple of years ago the hot plug slots were a joke. It was nearly impossible to swap a card without disturbing the others in the chassis, and crashing the server. The cards did not slide out cleanly; ribbon cables for RAID drives ran across the top of the hot plug slots; etc. So, watch out - you need slots which are hot plug in deed as well as in word :-)

I didn't say they *worked* :-). The newer stuff is probably slightly better, simply because of the push towards faster bus speeds; with 100+ MHz PCI-X, each PCI-X bus is limited to a single slot. So, it's a bit harder to screw up nearby slots, because they don't share a bus. That doesn't solve the ribbon cable problem, though.


I've used a couple hot-swap servers, but I've never actually hot-swapped anything in production. I was able to add a NIC to a test box, but that's not much of a test.


Scott


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