[ofa-general] Re: [PATCH RFC] opensm/event_plugin: plugin API version 2

[Sasha Khapyorsky]

Hi Jason,

On 14:37 Fri 27 Jun     , Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> How is this better than just patching opensm directly for people who
> want these kinds of things?

It is not better, it is different. Some things can be unrelated to
"pure" SM/SA functionality and not be part of OpenSM project, but
sometimes we may want to have it as part of OpenSM process, examples
are existing plugin 'opensmskumme' (it loads performance counters to
MySQL db), we wanted to have IB diagnostics plugin and management related
plugin.

> You can do alot of good by making the internal APIs 'plug in like' so
> adding new things doesn't require touching lots of places without
> going down the whole messy road of actual dynamically loadable plug ins..
> 
> But if you can't identify a fixed, clean API for a dynamically
> loadable plugin then you almost certainly should not have them in an
> open source project...
> 
> This is probably better long term as far as encouraging more
> contribution to opensm rather than encouraging contributions to be
> kept as plugins..

GPL is some sort of an issue - OFA requires dual licensing, so GPL only
code cannot enter OpenSM.

Sasha