PCI Hotplug Hardware Support

PCI Hotplug Hardware Support

[Daniel Norris]

Hi there,

Can anyone recommend a modern server/workstation (prefer tower form
factor) that supports PCI hotplug? I've checked with HP and Dell; both
of them have dropped support for hotplug, although it's supported by
the intel chipsets they use...

My customers use PCI FPGA cards for development. Each time they load a
device model onto their PCI cards, the card appears as whatever type
of device they loaded on the PCI bus for the the OS (linux) to
interact with.  So, I'm not necessarily looking for
electrical/physical support, but software support as devices
appear/disappear from the bus.

Right now, we have to reboot the server each time their cards are
reconfigured, but I'd like to remove that need.

Thanks,
--Dan

Re: PCI Hotplug Hardware Support

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 08:07:43AM -0700, Daniel Norris wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Can anyone recommend a modern server/workstation (prefer tower form
> factor) that supports PCI hotplug? I've checked with HP and Dell; both
> of them have dropped support for hotplug, although it's supported by
> the intel chipsets they use...
> 
> My customers use PCI FPGA cards for development. Each time they load a
> device model onto their PCI cards, the card appears as whatever type
> of device they loaded on the PCI bus for the the OS (linux) to
> interact with.  So, I'm not necessarily looking for
> electrical/physical support, but software support as devices
> appear/disappear from the bus.
> 
> Right now, we have to reboot the server each time their cards are
> reconfigured, but I'd like to remove that need.

There is the "fakephp" kernel driver support, that might work for you,
but it doesn't do any electrical reset of the device, so that might
cause problems with your hardware.

good luck,

greg k-h