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.
According to a report from Phoronix, version 6.11 of the mainline Linux kernel, which seems set to launch soon, will add support for RISC-V memory hot plugging. The Linux kernel already offered this feature for other CPU architectures, but it’s a very important addition for the long-term health of the open-architecture RISC-V CPUs since server applications and the like wouldn’t be as resilient without easy hot plugging support.
For those unfamiliar with RAM hot plugging or hot swapping, it’s very similar in concept to HDD/SSD hot plugging and hot swapping — the user can replace the specific component without powering down the system. However, hot plugging storage drives is a pretty mainstream feature of consumer operating systems and motherboards, whereas hot plugging RAM certainly is not.
Memory hot plugging has existed in some form or another for quite a long time—it was even available on the ultra-retro Zilog Z80 CPUs of the 1980s. Today, though, it’s mostly locked down to server motherboards and, with them, dedicated server versions of Windows or most Linux distributions.
