[ofa-general] iWARP issues

[Roland Dreier]

 > > > - missing verbs (IB-only, iWARP-only, and iWARP-nonstandard),
 > > > for example FMR, send with invalidate. (I recall that complete
 > > > list was flash out a year ago) (ULP changes to take advantage
 > > > of these verbs: e.g. NFS-RDMA, iSER).

 > > I haven't seen any discussion of this yet.  Is it really 
 > > worth taking up face-to-face time on this?  It seems like it 
 > > should all be pretty straightforward, and even if it isn't, 
 > > we haven't spent the time to figure out what the not 
 > > straightforward parts are yet.

 > There was a discussion about it almost a year ago.
 > I think if RNIC vendors will fund a person to move this forward.
 > This is why it need planery time.
 > IB vendors are also needed there because many of the same verbs
 > are transport independent and defined in IBTA spec v1.2.

I still don't understand why we have to waste face-to-face time on
this.  Is there anything that can't be accomplished via email or just
by sitting down and implementing things?  The fact that there was a
discussion about it a year ago and no further progress really says to
me that the problem is not lack of discussion.

In general I think we should only use face-to-face time on things that
we have tried to resolve through normal online channels and gotten
stuck on.  It's a complete waste of time to get together and talk
about a big general topic where we don't know what the real issues
are; the discussion just ends up being, "Yep, yep, I agree, yep, that
makes sense, yep, we should look at that, OK, I'm not sure, I need to
look that up, OK, we should do this via email," and we burn a big
chunk of the day in a completely unproductive way.

 > > > - RDMA connection timeout; expand RDMA_CM API to support 
 > > > timeout paramater (not iWARP specific)

 > > Again, I haven't seen any discussion yet, so it doesn't seem 
 > > worth taking up face-to-face-time until we know what the 
 > > sticking points are.

 > If Sean is doing it already we may not need planery time for it.

Even if Sean isn't doing it why do we need to spend time on it?  The
fact that you think one person just going off and working on it
eliminates the need for the session says to me that there is no need
for a session in the first place -- whoever cares about this issue
should just work on it, rather taking a lot of valuable face-to-face
time before there's anything to talk about (and probably not ending up
doing anything in the end).

 - R.