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

[Vladislav Bolkhovitin]

Chris Worley, on 04/27/2009 07:54 PM wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:03 AM, Bart Van Assche
> <bart.vanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Jack Morgenstein
>> <jackm at dev.mellanox.co.il> wrote:
>>> The OFED distributions may contain features that the mainstream kernels and libraries do not support.
>>> These features frequently require changes in the Infiniband kernel modules.  Such changes are in the form
>>> of kernel patches which are applied to the base mainstream kernel on which the OFED release is based.
>>> A lag between the mainstream kernel and the OFED kernel is unavoidable, since the new features are first
>>> released in the OFED distributions -- and later, gradually (and hopefully), these features make there way
>>> into the upstream kernel.
>> I don't doubt that there is a good reason why new features go in the
>> OFED distribution first and later in the mainstream Linux kernel.
> 
> My opinion is: IB is still just too bleeding edge, even for the
> vanilla Linux kernel.
> 
> Maybe "Upstream First" is the measure of IB achieving stability.
> 
> SRP (specifically the SCST target code) is my first case in using IB
> where I've not been able to start with the latest OFED (or IBGD)
> stable release, as OFED is unsupported by the SRP target code, and had
> to start with a distro's IB version to get a working SRP target (of
> which Ubuntu 8.10 provided the only stable SRP target distro for my
> configuration).

I think, to find out who's guilty, OFED or SRP target driver, you should 
simply try the latest SCST/SRP driver from the SCST SVN trunk with the 
known working OFED. Only make sure you don't have again mixed up older 
and new SCST headers.

Vlad