Microsoft Working On AMD GPU Hotplug Support For Linux Driver

Here is a combination not normally expected... Microsoft engineers have submitted patches for review enabling AMD GPU hot-plugging support with the Radeon "AMDGPU" Linux kernel driver.

Microsoft researchers are working on "GPU disaggregation technology" and this led them to working on AMDGPU hot-plug support for Linux.

Microsoft's Shuotao Xu commented, "We believe the support of hot-plug of GPU devices can open doors for many advanced applications in data center in the next few years, and we would like to have some reviewers on this PR so we can continue further technical discussions around this feature."

In the data center scope this functionality may prove important for Microsoft with Azure for hot adding/removing AMD accelerators to guest virtual machines. Separately in recent times AMD has worked on improving AMD GPU hot device unplugging with their graphics driver with the use-case there being for external GPUs.

They have posted their GPU hot-plug patch on the mailing list and GitHub for review and hopeful upstreaming.