dmdimon wrote:
FuzzySS, cheap trick
Question was - some additional drivers are needed or not? So what the answer is?
I was correcting your completely wrong statements (which has been dismissed by both the forum thread YOU linked to and Sonnet Tech's own FAQ. Please read that link, as it contradicts everything you have said.
dmdimon wrote:
Bullsh*t. RAID card I personally have at end of TB chain is NOT hotswappable as well. How many hotswappable cards are in Sonnet list? Who are talking about GPU hotswap? Power it on - then power on MBP.
BTW, what about gpu-over-USB, GPU-over-ExpressCard - how that (crap) can work at all in your world?
I did not say the cards were hot-swappable, please argue against my arguments, not the ones you imagine I say. I said the technologies were often run on hot-swappable buses (and connects hot-swappable devices themselves), and that is why some of the drivers work over TB. If all cards worked without alteration, there would be no need for a compatibility list as short as that, would it?
Nice of you to mention GPU over USB and ExpressCard, because it proves my point perfectly. Can you mention how many of those that work in OS X without a driver specifically written for the configuration? Because last I checked, they all required drivers with hot-swap support.
dmdimon wrote:
This causes the videocard to be brought up much later in the boot process, which will cause all sort of initialization problems unless the driver actually supports this. Storage and capturing cards generally handle this much better because they are often run on hotswappable buses.
twice bullsh*t. You can unload and reload GPU kexts anytime as you want - you as hardware bound developer should know it. And PCI-e based, designed for INTERNAL expansion cards of any type are on same bus and are not hotswappable by design.
I never said you couldn't. What I did say was that the GPU kexts will crash or misbehave if you bring them up later in the boot process than they were intended to. This is PRECISELY because PCI-e is not hot-swappable. And it doesn't matter if PCI-e is made for permanent connection as long as it is proxied over Thunderbolt which IS hot-swappable. That means the Thunderbolt connection can be disconnected at any time, and that the underlying TB subsystems is initialized at a completely different stage in boot.