> Now people are taking adding a USB device for granted, but realistically that did not use to be the case. That whole being able to hotplug devices, we've had all these fundamental infrastructure changes that we've had to keep up with.
Did anyone else notice this? In the last ~5 years, half a decade, we went from every major OS crashing on hot swaps or usb plugins or not recognizing devices or other crippling issues on hot swapping almost any hardware, to being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms.
That is really amazing tech, and in this era of touch phones and web apps, we are still having huge leaps at the lowest levels of usability.
I'm old enough to remember when hotplugging even a USB device was a massive pain in Linux, but didn't really think until now how far it has come along.
> being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms
Are we really at that point? I know you can swap USB devices and even hard disks, but I thought that unplugging almost anything inside the computer would lock it up?
If this is common please give me that list of vendors.
My new Proliants can hot plug memory, disk controllers, disk drives but definitely not the CPU (offline, yes). vSphere has the capability to hot add vCPUs and memory. As far as I know swapping out CPUs in a running system is still uncommon.
Most of their P series (AIX Power systems) can hotplug almost anything also (I've never hot-swapped CPUs on one, but I thought I saw an option in SMIT for that).
True. I can remember hotswapping durn near every module in a system the early '90s. But then again I was working with large telecom systems designed with massive redundency.
Well, except for the fact that my MacBook Air and MacBook Pro crash (Kernel Fault, hard freeze, requires power cycle) on numerous USB devices - both FTDI VCP serial drivers, as well as whatever is driving the Keyspan Triplite Console box.
This has been true on pretty much every release of OS X Lion 10.7. Every two-three months I drop in a new driver from the FTDI site, and upgrade to a new patch of Lion - but both devices continue to sporadically black-screen me.
Every time I pull out a USB cable/Plug it it it's like I'm rolling dice.
The FTDI drivers on Windows XP are pretty mature (I've never had a crash on that platform), and I think they're built into recent releases of the Linux kernel - and I've heard no complaints there (or experienced them myself)- so, perhaps this is actually proving your point somewhat.
We still have a ways to go before we experience 5 9s reliability on USB Hot Plug though...
For what it's worth, we run into these FTDI panics with Monome devices all the time. I've called FTDI personally to discuss this with them (iirc it was about a year ago, and I'd been sending them panic reports for a solid 8 months before that) and they just don't seem to care.
No problems on Windows, and yes, the ftdi_sio module has been a part of the Linux source tree for quite some time (even OpenBSD has an FTDI driver).
> Now people are taking adding a USB device for granted, but realistically that did not use to be the case. That whole being able to hotplug devices, we've had all these fundamental infrastructure changes that we've had to keep up with.
Did anyone else notice this? In the last ~5 years, half a decade, we went from every major OS crashing on hot swaps or usb plugins or not recognizing devices or other crippling issues on hot swapping almost any hardware, to being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms.
That is really amazing tech, and in this era of touch phones and web apps, we are still having huge leaps at the lowest levels of usability.