[ofa-general] Re: How to tell what OFED rev a distro derived IB modules?

[Bart Van Assche]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Jack Morgenstein
<jackm at dev.mellanox.co.il> wrote:
> On Monday 27 April 2009 13:46, Moni Shoua wrote:
>> So, Is there an easy way for upstream kernel users that want user space functionality?
>>
> Why can't they just install OFED?  This affects ONLY the infiniband modules, and has undergone
> extensive QA on lots of platforms.

I'm not sure that replacing the distro-provided InfiniBand components
by the kernel drivers included in OFED is always a good idea. The
mainstream kernel namely contains some InfiniBand patches that are not
present in OFED. As an example, commit
233e70f4228e78eb2f80dc6650f65d3ae3dbf17c was applied to Linus' tree on
October 19, 2008. This patch simplifies the file API such that it is
no longer possible that kernel code causes a memory leak by forgetting
to evict a file from fasync lists. I could not find any trace of this
patch in the OFED distribution -- not even in
OFED-1.4.1-20090427-0600.

See also:
* http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/31/310
* http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.29.y.git;a=commitdiff;h=233e70f4228e78eb2f80dc6650f65d3ae3dbf17c

Bart.