[ofa-general] Status of NFS over RDMA and SRP?

[Talpey, Thomas]

At 10:41 AM 10/2/2008, Steven Truelove wrote:
>Hi,
>
>    I am considering using our existing Infiniband interconnect to 
>provide high-speed storage access to our compute cluster. It looks like 
>the two ways to do this are NFS over RDMA and SRP.
>
>    I have found downloads for NFS over RDMA, but it is for an older 
>kernel, and doesn't appear to be maintained at the moment.

NFS/RDMA is present in the mainline kernel starting with 2.6.25 for the
client and 2.6.26 for the server. Just configure it in File Systems->Network
Filesystems->NFS etc, the NFS/RDMA options appear whenever the RDMA
layer is available.

>  Similarly, I 
>have found little about SRP.
>
>    What is the current status of these features?  Is anyone currently 
>maintaining these projects?  Are they part of OFED?  Do they have 
>separate mailing lists?

NFS/RDMA will also be part of OFED starting with 1.4, but whether
that is your best choice depends on what kernel you're planning to
run. If you're running RHEL5 and want to stay on it, then OFED1.4
would be your best choice. NFS overall is a very active development
area, and NFS/RDMA especially is usually best from the top of the tree
in kernel.org. In fact I have a number of client patches almost ready
to go for (hopefully) 2.6.28. There are also a large number of server
patches already in the 2.6.27 rc's.

We have a mailing list for NFS/RDMA support at sourceforge, you can
find it from <http://nfs-rdma.sourceforge.net>. Or, simply post to the
Linux NFS list at linux-nfs at vger.kernel.org, or to me and Tom Tucker
(cc'd, server NFS/RDMA) directly.

Tom.