[openib-general] [PATCH][RFC] kDAPL: remove dat wrapper funct ion dat_ia_query()

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 08:22:11AM -0700, Tom Duffy wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 11:47 +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > It is.  B?ut I think it'll change even more later on - having a pointer
> > to the method table in every object is an enormous waste of space, in
> > the end the method should probably be only in a hca-level object, and
> > all other objects should have public pointers to it.
> 
> Can you please explain this a bit more?  A 32 or 64 bit pointer is a
> waste of space?  Or are you saying that each provider should just define
> a struct and have a global pointer to it?

No.  What I mean is that we don't need a pointer to the method table in
every single object.  We don't have network driver methods in every
sk_buff, struct sock and what other objects exist in the network stack.

Instead the method table should be in some top-level per-HCA or per-port
which most other object will have pointers to anyway (maybe through one
or two indirections).

This will need quite a bit of revamp of the dat codebase to move more
members of the objects to the public part of it, but that should happen
anyway.