[ofa-general] OFED and Ubuntu Linux

[Erez Zilber]

Bart Van Assche wrote:
>
> On Jan 8, 2008 10:10 PM, Roland Dreier <rdreier at cisco.com> wrote:
> >  > Is the OFED software stack supported on Ubuntu Linux ? While OFED
> >  > 1.2.5.4 compiles fine on Ubuntu Linux 7.10, I got the following
> errors
> >  > while installing the RPM's:
> >
> > Just out of curiosity, what packages from OFED are you interested in
> > using on Ubuntu?  My goal would be to get most IB/RDMA-related stuff
> > into the upstream Debian/Ubuntu distributions directly, so that you
> > don't have to mess around with OFED at all.
> >
> > Currently, Ubuntu 7.10 has a 2.6.22 kernel, which has most IB support
> > built in, and the ubuntu archive has packages for libibverbs and
> > libmthca in universe.  8.04 (Hardy) will have a 2.6.24 kernel and adds
> > openmpi packages (built with libibverbs support).  I have libmlx4
> > packaged for hardy in my PPA:
> >
> >     deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/roland.dreier/ubuntu hardy main
> >     deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/roland.dreier/ubuntu hardy main
> >
> > (libmlx4 is in Debian testing so it should propagate automatically
> > into Ubuntu universe for Hardy+1).
> >
> > I am planning on packaging librdmacm for Debian and Ubuntu in the next
> > few weeks.  The packages will appear in my PPA and should be ready in
> > plenty of time for Hardy+1.  Are there any other packages you are
> > looking for?
>
> Hello Roland,
>
> I'm looking for iSCSI, iSER initiator, iSER target, SDP initiator, SDP
> target and uDAPL support. I'm not sure which are the corresponding
> OFED packages -- probably perftest, libibverbs, libibverbs-utils,
> libibverbs-devel, libmlx4, libmthca, librdmacm, librdmacm-devel and
> ofed-docs ?
>

I hope that I can help you with the iSCSI over iSER part. I don't have
an Ubuntu machine, but I checked the status on Debian (lenny/sid):

    * OFED contains open-iscsi (iSCSI initiator) with iSER support.
      However, it doesn't run on Debian/Ubuntu.
    * Debian has an open-iscsi package that contains the userspace code.
      The kernel code is in Debian's kernel (iSER was pushed into the
      kernel in 2.6.18, so it should be there). In order to run
      open-iscsi over iSER, you don't need any IB userspace packages.
      Therefore, you don't need OFED for the initiator side.
    * OFED 1.3 doesn't contain an iSCSI over iSER target. We plan to add
      that in OFED 1.4. I still don't know if it will have support for
      Debian/Ubuntu. The target is called stgt.
    * If you still want to run an iSCSI over iSER target, I suggest that
      you follow the instructions in a short howto that we wrote:
      https://wiki.openfabrics.org/tiki-index.php?page=ISER-target

I hope it helps.

Erez