[openib-general] Re: [PATCH 9 of 20] ipath - char devices for diagnostics and lightweight subnet management

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 15:20 -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:

> I've never understood what forces you to maintain two separate SMAs.
> Why can't you pick one of the two SMAs and use that unconditionally?

Three reasons.

      * OpenSM wasn't usable when we wrote our SMA.  We have customers
        using ours now, so we have to support it.
      * Our SMA does some setup for the layered ethernet emulation
        driver.
      * Our SMA works without an IB stack of any kind present.

	<b