[openib-general] IB: I don't like what I'm seeing.

Wed Mar 31 10:51:06 PST 2004

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 08:22:30PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 09:11:00AM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
> >     Troy> In the interest of parallelism ;) , we should also have
> >     Troy> another effort that works on different ULP's, and the 'whole
> >     Troy> stack', but Ron shouldn't have to know anything about it, or
> >     Troy> the complexity involved.
> > 
> > This is not a bad idea.  However I think most of the people involved
> > in OpenIB are interested in building a full-performance,
> > InfiniBand-compliant stack.  Therefore I think this UD-only effort
> > should be the alternate track.
> 
> Well, given the mess all existing stacks are I guess ron's idea would
> be the best way to get ib support into the kernel.  And for the typical
> cluster interconnect ib use that I see most vendors looking after it
> sounds like the right thing.
> 
> If we need alternate features let's build ontop of that.  This
> incremental development process has worked quite well in the linux
> history.  At least much better than the usual vendor mess all current
> ib stacks are.

  To some extent the code has already been split up into seperate modules
to allow for loading a simplified subset of the code, with the potential
exception of the hardware driver itself. For example the reliable connection
manager, subnet managment clients, higher level protocols, etc... are
seperatly buildable modules from the core transport services (verbs) and 
provider interface modules. I agree that beginning with a subset is probably
the correct approach for kernel inclusion, but there are people who rely
on different advanced features. I also agree that there should be an
effort to further simplify the size of the minimal subset from the current
minimal subset.

  On a tangent when is the subversion repository expected to be available
for import? It would be nice to be able to start addressing cosmetic and
structural issues/changes in an open repository. Maybe an 0.XX directory
for the current code found in the downloads section...

-Libor

-- 
To unsubscribe send an email with subject unsubscribe to openib-general at openib.org.
Please contact moderator at openib.org for questions.