this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
170 points (98.9% liked)
PC Gaming
8615 readers
752 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand how this is an advantage. Yes, you can swap RAM with the system powered up, but what happens to the information in the module that was removed? Is the OS doing some kind of RAID-like memory allocation? The article wasn't clear on how this would actually work.
Servers have had memory mirroring as a feature for years. This seems like a cool extension of that technology. It would be an advantage in some systems where scaling out isn't an option and single node availability needs to be as high as possible.
Apparently, there's some coordination mechanism, where you tell the OS that you want to remove a certain memory stick, so it moves all the memory onto other RAM sticks (or uses paging to move it to your hard drive). Only then would you actually physically unplug the memory stick.
See, for example: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/memory-hotplug.html
(Mind that this is kernel documentation. If you actually want to do this, there's probably some CLI program to make it easier.)
Then it's not Hot Swap, just Lukewarm Swap?
I guess, you could see it that way...? The important part is that you don't have to turn off the whole system. It can continue running without interruption. So, the RAM will be lukewarm when you swap it, but the system will still be hot.
If you really want to be pedantic you could setup raid 1+0 or 5 and live the true RAM hot swapping life
So "warm plugging" is a thing - it means a piece of hardware is detachable while the machine is asleep.
USB devices are also hotpluggable, but that doesn't mean that the data stays in the system if you just pull out the HDD.
But the ram will loose it without being powered.
This would either require persistent memory or something that could cache the flash for some minutes.