[openib-general] [ANNOUNCE] Initial trunk checkin of ISERinitiator

[Talpey, Thomas]

At 07:41 PM 8/18/2005, Grant Grundler wrote:
>If kDAPL for any reason doesn't get pushed upstream to kernel.org,
>we effectively don't have iSER or NFS/RDMA in linux. 
>Since I think without them, linux won't be competitive in the
>commercial market place.

Put another way, OpenIB want storage to use it, and vice versa.

I can speak for NFS/RDMA. If NFS/RDMA doesn't have kDAPL,
then it gets thrown backwards due to having to reimplement.
That's recoverable (sigh) but there are still missing pieces.

By far the largest is the connection and addressing models.
There is, as yet, no unified means for an upper layer to connect
over any other transport in the OpenIB framework. In fact, there
isn't even a way to use IP addressing on the OpenIB framework
now, which is an even more fundamental issue.

So, yes, without kDAPL at the moment we don't have iSER or
NFS/RDMA. We can recode the message handling pieces to
OpenIB verbs. For NFS/RDMA, that's not even a ton of work.

Then we'll be forced to reimplement or reuse pretty much
all of the connect and listen code, and the IP address translation,
atop OpenIB.

How quickly can OpenIB move to a transport model that supports
these missing pieces? I can give a different answer with that
information.

Tom.