this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 66 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Meanwhile, Windows requires you to buy a new license if you change your mouse.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

That's not entirely true. You can get a universal mouse license that will cover up to twenty approved mouse changes.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Did anyone else notice that in their stock photo they're trying to put the DIMM into the socket backwards?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You want that distinct crunch as you force the RAM in with a mallet

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

same with the CPU, the last thing you want are straight pins yuck

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Every stock photos is like a mini Easter eggs hunt.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Then it's not Hot Swap, just Lukewarm Swap?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

If you really want to be pedantic you could setup raid 1+0 or 5 and live the true RAM hot swapping life

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

So "warm plugging" is a thing - it means a piece of hardware is detachable while the machine is asleep.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

USB devices are also hotpluggable, but that doesn't mean that the data stays in the system if you just pull out the HDD.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I remember the ‘good old days’ of Sun Fire 10k and similar servers. You could replace entire boards of CPU and RAM and the server would keep on trucking.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

IBM System-Z mainframes still support CPU hot-swapping AFAIK.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Don’t. I still miss Sun. I miss that “Hey, fuck MS Office’s crazy pricing. Let’s buy their competitor for less and open source it!” energy.

We need more of that in these times.

I remap Caps Lock to Ctrl to this day as that’s where it’s meant to be, god damn it!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Excellent! Hot swap all the things!!!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

FInally, Banjo Tooie on PC