this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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How do you think hot swappable CPUs would work? (burggit.moe)
submitted 1 year ago by Burger@burggit.moe to c/askburggit@burggit.moe
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Let's just say hypothetically this was possible and that the laws of silicon were not a thing, and that there was market demand for it for some asinine reason. As well as every OS process scheduler was made to optionally work with this. How would this work?

Personally, I'd say there would be a smol lower clocked CPU on the board that would kick on and take over if you were to pull the big boy CPU out and swap it while the system is running.

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[โ€“] RA2lover@burggit.moe 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Linux already has support for this, but it still has multiple limitations such as requiring multiple CPUs or including a hard limit for how many CPUs can be installed.

Assuming a consumer use case (single CPU socket, no real-time requirements) the easiest approach would be including an additional soft-off power state (S2/S3, but also setting the CPU into G3 and isolating things such as RAM), a way to prevent wake-up while the CPU is not connected, and a restart vector that lets the OS tell applications a CPU has been changed to let them safely exit code dependent on feature flags that may not be present. TPMs stay on the removed CPU, so anything relying on their PCRs gets hosed.

[โ€“] Burger@burggit.moe 2 points 1 year ago

The Linux kernel once again amazes me. It seems to have absolutely everything. I tried looking to see videos of this in action from a hands-on perspective to see how this would work, but I get nothing but LTT clickbait garbage.