3 mo. ago • 98%

RISC-V chips will support replacing RAM sticks without powering off the system — hot plugging functionality arriving in newer flavors of Linux

www.tomshardware.com RISC-V chips will support replacing RAM sticks without powering off the system — hot plugging functionality arriving in newer flavors of Linux

RISC-V gets a feature that may prove integral to future server and enterprise implementations

33 comments

Cool, but why?

66
- Enterprise server use mainly, to minimize downtime, which is a huge deal there. On the consumer level it doesn't have much purpose.
  
  68
  
  I'm curious, does a 3 minutes power down to replace a RAM stick is that much of a deal in enterprise server that they need to invented a whole new technology just for that?
  
  -1
Meanwhile, Windows requires you to buy a new license if you change your mouse.

40
- That's not entirely true. You can get a universal mouse license that will cover up to twenty approved mouse changes.
  
  6
Did anyone else notice that in their stock photo they're trying to put the DIMM into the socket backwards?

23
- You want that distinct crunch as you force the RAM in with a mallet
  
  21
  
  same with the CPU, the last thing you want are straight pins yuck
  
  11
- Every stock photos is like a mini Easter eggs hunt.
  
  14
I don't understand how this is an advantage. Yes, you can swap RAM with the system powered up, but what happens to the information in the module that was removed? Is the OS doing some kind of RAID-like memory allocation? The article wasn't clear on how this would actually work.

21
- Servers have had memory mirroring as a feature for years. This seems like a cool extension of that technology. It would be an advantage in some systems where scaling out isn't an option and single node availability needs to be as high as possible.
  
  22
- Apparently, there's some coordination mechanism, where you tell the OS that you want to remove a certain memory stick, so it moves all the memory onto other RAM sticks (or uses paging to move it to your hard drive). Only then would you actually physically unplug the memory stick.
  
  See, for example: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/memory-hotplug.html
  (Mind that this is kernel documentation. If you actually want to do this, there's probably some CLI program to make it easier.)
  
  20
  
  Then it's not Hot Swap, just Lukewarm Swap?
  
  17
- USB devices are also hotpluggable, but that doesn't mean that the data stays in the system if you just pull out the HDD.
  
  1
  
  But the ram will loose it without being powered.
  This would either require persistent memory or something that could cache the flash for some minutes.
  
  1
I remember the ‘good old days’ of Sun Fire 10k and similar servers. You could replace entire boards of CPU and RAM and the server would keep on trucking.

11
- IBM System-Z mainframes still support CPU hot-swapping AFAIK.
  
  9
- Don’t. I still miss Sun. I miss that “Hey, fuck MS Office’s crazy pricing. Let’s buy their competitor for less and open source it!” energy.
  
  We need more of that in these times.
  
  I remap Caps Lock to Ctrl to this day as that’s where it’s meant to be, god damn it!
  
  4
Excellent! Hot swap all the things!!!

5
- FInally, Banjo Tooie on PC
  
  3

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