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I'm old enough to remember when hotplugging even a USB device was a massive pain in Linux, but didn't really think until now how far it has come along.

> being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms

Are we really at that point? I know you can swap USB devices and even hard disks, but I thought that unplugging almost anything inside the computer would lock it up?



It's not uncommon in servers to remove or swap things like CPUs and memory while running. The OSes running on them must (and can) handle that.


If this is common please give me that list of vendors.

My new Proliants can hot plug memory, disk controllers, disk drives but definitely not the CPU (offline, yes). vSphere has the capability to hot add vCPUs and memory. As far as I know swapping out CPUs in a running system is still uncommon.


I believe many of the high end Sun Servers supported hot swapable memory and CPU's. Only on their higher end servers though.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_z

I won't make any comment about how common they are, one way or another.

IBM has made some amazing tech over the years.


Most of their P series (AIX Power systems) can hotplug almost anything also (I've never hot-swapped CPUs on one, but I thought I saw an option in SMIT for that).


True. I can remember hotswapping durn near every module in a system the early '90s. But then again I was working with large telecom systems designed with massive redundency.




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