[Asterisk-Users] Hot plug PCI?

[Scott Laird]

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