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> But most PCI devices themselves do not expect to be hot-plugged Is that actually true? It's been some time since I went through the protocol, but PCIe does h
by timthorn 16y ago
> But most PCI devices themselves do not expect to be hot-plugged
Is that actually true? It's been some time since I went through the protocol, but PCIe does have native support for hot-plug. Certainly during the enumeration, I don't see why a card (distinct from the host) would care in the least whether the rest of the system was booted or not.
Don't forget that ExpressCards are effectively PCIe, and they have no problems with being inserted or removed whilst a system is turned on.
- justanotheratom 16y agoIt is true that in theory, they should be hot-pluggable. But try plugging out a hard-drive while your system is running, bad things happen. USB devices, on the other hand, expect to be hot-plugged, and take appropriate measures for that. For example, removable media flash drives don't do as much caching in volatile memory as internal SATA hard drives. Another example would be a graphics card, which, if you plugin while the system is running, won't get recognized. But if you want to use Thunderbolt to power external displays that carry their own graphics cards, the underlying assumption being that the card already knows how to talk PCI, then you can see that there will be a problem.