As the industry’s premier cloud computing giant, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service has attracted a considerable number of customers around the world. Meanwhile, there are now a fair number of AMD GPU-accelerated cards on the company’s Linux data center servers.
However, when a new GPU needs to be replaced or installed, maintenance personnel often need to implement it in a shutdown state, resulting in a considerable downtime of non-essential services. The good news is that Microsoft engineers are working hard to bring hot-swap patches for AMD GPUs to Linux.
It is reported that Microsoft has created a unique driver to enable “hot-swap” (hot-swap) of AMD GPUs on the company’s Linux servers – meaning the ability to swap the graphics card while the system is active. Remove from PCIe slot and replace with another one.
Engineer Shuotao Xu from Microsoft Research posted a code review request for a community review of AMD GPU hot-plug support for the Linux operating system and focused on Microsoft Azure cloud services.
Although Microsoft has not disclosed more details of the proprietary driver, it will at least enable Azure servers without GPUs to support GPU computing acceleration solutions from AMD.
As servers are becoming busier than clients, hot-plug support for GPUs will also be a useful feature. Before this, we heard more about “hot-plugging” on consumer systems (such as eGPU external graphics docking stations based on Thunderbolt).