[ofa-general] Location and naming of RDMA stack enablement rpm

[Doug Ledford]

Hey Roland, I cc:ed you directly on this because I'm going to propose 
something that involves you ;-)

Right now, in the OFED packaging, there are extra files added to the 
overall stack that aren't currently part of any base RPM.  I'm mainly 
talking about things like the /etc/udev.d/rules/90-ib.rules, 
/etc/init.d/openibd, etc.  These files belong to none of the upstream 
rpms, yet they (or administrator hand edited equivalents) are required 
for the stack to work well.

Since both prior to the IB/iWARP merge and after, libibverbs is required 
for most functionality to operate at all, I would propose that those 
basic startup files be included in the libibverbs rpm.

The list of files I'm proposing to add to libibverbs would look 
something like this:

%dir %{_sysconfdir}/ofed
%config(noreplace) %{_sysconfdir}/ofed/openib.conf
%{_initrddir}/openibd
/etc/udev/rules.d/90-ib.rules

The list isn't very big actually, but one important item I also wanted 
to discuss is the %dir entry above.  During the initial package review I 
was subjected to when submitting the openib package for inclusion in Red 
Hat, the request was made that we put all the related config files in 
/etc into their own subdirectory.  Whatever base package includes the 
openibd init script should also own that directory according to the rpm 
database.  Now, at the time I put our openib package together, I chose 
/etc/ofed because A) ofed is what the package is, and B) there wasn't a 
consensus here about where it should go (other than /usr/local).

So, on top of proposing that these items go into libibverbs, I'd like to 
request that we reach a consensus on what name to use in /etc for 
consolidating these config files and put all the reasonably related 
config files in that directory.  For example, the dat.conf should go in 
there, as well as opensm.conf, libsdp.conf, and openibd.conf.  However, 
I would not recommend placing the various mpi config files under there 
as these are fully functional, stand alone applications that can run 
with or without the RDMA stack underneath it.

That being said, I'll say that my preference for the name of the 
directory is /etc/ofa.  I prefer ofa over ofed because eventually this 
stack should be buildable package by package without doing a big 
conglomerate build of everything.  In fact, I'm currently going through 
git repos and making changes to the head of each repo to enable the 
packages to be built easily by themselves via rpm spec file rules. 
Under that sort of build environment, ofed is misleading while ofa is 
accurate.

So, that's it.  In a nutshell, basic kernel setup scripts for user space 
added to libibverbs RPM and get consensus on an official /etc directory 
for use by all relevant RPMs in the RDMA stack, with my vote going for 
/etc/ofa.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs can be found at
http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband