RISC-V chips will support replacing RAM sticks without powering off the system — hot plugging functionality arriving in newer flavors of Linux
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
You're viewing a single thread.
Cool, but why?
Enterprise server use mainly, to minimize downtime, which is a huge deal there. On the consumer level it doesn't have much purpose.
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?
The hangup is that you think shutting down and restarting a server takes 3 minutes
The surplus enterprise hardware I have in my homelab takes 3 minutes to just get to BIOS
Buddy works in a data center. Ram upgrades on a few racks of servers took him weeks…
Mind you this was with zero downtime. So spin up a server, move the traffic, shut down/swap ram, boot up server, swap traffic back, repeat until you want to cry.
yeah.
The coveted 5 9s of availability is only 5.26 minutes of downtime
5.26 minutes per year*
Yes. Server boot times are long. Enterprise level NICs and hard drive controllers do a lot of checking at startup.
Historically, there were Sun servers that could hot swap CPUs. X86 can't do that, though.
Many that weren't based on x86 microcompters could do this: Tandem, I mean, Compaq, I mean HP NonStop machines, Sun Ultra Enterprise as you mentioned, IBM s390 and System-Z, several HPUX systems, I'm sure there's others.
First of all, yeah. In enterprise, 1000 transactions per second can be a requirement. Second, enterprise servers take longer to spool up than 3 minutes.
Depending on your SLA, 3 minutes can be a pretty big chunk of your monthly error budget.
Have you ever power cycled a server? It can take over 10 minutes depending on the machine.