IT Home April 8 news that Microsoft has gained cloud computing business in many enterprises around the world with its Azure server technology. Currently, Microsoft uses AMD datacenter GPUs and Linux in its servers. However, when a new GPU needs to be replaced or installed, the server needs to be shut down, which is obviously inconvenient.
So Microsoft plans to create a unique driver for AMD GPUs that can enable the "hot plug" feature of AMD GPUs on their Linux servers. As the name suggests, hot plugging means that the graphics card can be removed from the PCIe interface and replaced with another while the system is active.
Shuotao Xu, an engineer at Microsoft Research, has issued the following request for a code review of AMD GPU hot-plug support for the Linux operating system. It focuses on Microsoft Azure systems to help support GPU-based hot-swappable features when needed. The Microsoft research team made a similar request on GitHub.
IT Home understands that Microsoft provides little information about the new GPU technology, which is proprietary to Microsoft and is designed to allow Azure systems to include GPU acceleration into servers that don't yet have graphics cards installed.
Hot-swappable graphics and accelerator cards via PCIe is a new concept. The original hot-swappable was used in some consumer systems, such as eGFX, to allow the graphics card to be hot-swapped through the Thunderbolt interface. As data centers become more common in the market, this new technology will benefit Microsoft's Azure Systems, AMD, and the company's GPU product line.