Hot Swapping PCI-e cards

[SameerRVM]

So, I just saw the new episode of LTT where Linus just literally been able to swap the PCI-e cards without even turning off the system. I mean how cool is that; Just put a new card like pendrives. Is there any specific motherboard which supports this kind of thing like the dual cpu socket motherboard from LTT or we can just do it on any modern motherboards? Also what setting do we have to change? (I mean Linus showed how to do it but I didn't understand that much maybe I need to get into deep).

[TheRandomness]

Only certain motherboards support it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

This has been support on POWER systems for a while now. The other problem is lots of drivers don't like this. They mainly added this for nvme 2.5 in dirves.

[Windows7ge]

It's kind of neat but it's really kind of useless at home unless you have a system providing a service that needs to be on 24/7/365 otherwise you can turn a computer off, put the part in, and turn it back on in 5 minutes.

 

SATA hot swap in a nice perk if you're constantly swapping drives in and out but that has been a thing for a long time now.

 

All in all I'm not that impressed and it needs to be a feature of the motherboard to use it. Your OS has to be OK with it too or else you'll see those WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR BSODs if not worse and actually damage the hardware.

[Sniperfox47]

6 hours ago, freakysam08 said:

 Is there any specific motherboard which supports this kind of thing like the dual cpu socket motherboard from LTT or we can just do it on any modern motherboards? Also what setting do we have to change?

Most mid to high end server motherboards (ex. C600 chipset boards) support it. Some very very high end workstation platform (ex. X299) *may* support it.

 

The settings aren't cut and dry. You need an OS that supports it, and you need to set the UEFI settings to "whatever the device needs to hotplug". There's no one single setting and you may need to tweak things. Some devices may need wider DMA register spaces, some may have drivers that don't work nicely with OS based hotplug, some early OSes didn't work with hotplug properly but it could be hacked in, there's a lot of different possibilities that come up.

 

Honestly about the only thing I could see this being useful to home users for is U.2 NVMe hotplug, in the same vein as SATA hotplug. But that would require U.2 to actually like... you know... catch on...