[Asterisk-Users] Hot plug PCI?

[Steve Underwood]

Scott Laird wrote:

>
> On Mar 31, 2004, at 12:01 AM, Nicolas Bougues wrote:
>
>> - hardware : you must have hotplug capable boards and bus. I believe
>>   the only option there is CompactPCI, and of course cPCI boards and
>>   chassis are very different from your day-to-day PCI stuff. Of course
>>   Digium boards, as well as any other standard PCI board does not
>>   fit.
>>   cPCI boards and chassis are considerably more expensive than their
>>   standard counterparts, if they exist at all.
>>
>> You can't just hot (un)plug a standard PCI board : the bus is not
>> meant for this, you have most chances of destroying your board and/or
>> your bus.
>
>
> 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 :-)

Regards,
Steve