[openib-general] RDMA Generic Connection Management

[Sean Hefty]

Roland Dreier wrote:
> Hey, that's a really good point.  We should make sure that our API
> makes it easy to handle device hotplug.
> 
> One solution is to start reference counting device references, but
> that inevitably leads to bugs in ULPs -- protocol authors won't get it
> right unless we make it really easy.  And I don't see how to make the
> reference counting trivial.
> 
> Anyone have a better idea?

Thinking about this more, I think that what we have for verbs works well.  We 
can probably think of device removal as similar to having fatal errors on all 
QPs associated with the device.  Assuming that ULPs should handle QP errors, 
then handling device removal doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

For this to work, we should ensure that a client is never given a reference to a 
device that they may have received removal notification for.  And this should 
probably be handled on a per module basis.

- Sean