[ofa-general] [PATCHv4 0/10] RDMAoE support

[Hal Rosenstock]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 4:27 AM, Eli Cohen <eli at dev.mellanox.co.il> wrote:

> RDMA over Ethernet (RDMAoE) allows running the IB transport protocol using
> Ethernet frames, enabling the deployment of IB semantics on lossless
> Ethernet
> fabrics. RDMAoE packets are standard Ethernet frames with an IEEE assigned
> Ethertype, a GRH, unmodified IB transport headers and payload.  IB subnet
> management and SA services are not required for RDMAoE operation; Ethernet
> management practices are used instead. RDMAoE encodes IP addresses into its
> GIDs and resolves MAC addresses using the host IP stack. For multicast
> GIDs,
> standard IP to MAC mappings apply.
>
> To support RDMAoE, a new transport protocol was added to the IB core. An
> RDMA
> device can have ports with different transports, which are identified by a
> port
> transport attribute.  The RDMA Verbs API is syntactically unmodified. When
> referring to RDMAoE ports, Address handles are required to contain GIDs
> while
> LID fields are ignored. The Ethernet L2 information is subsequently
> obtained by
> the vendor-specific driver (both in kernel- and user-space) while modifying
> QPs
> to RTR and creating address handles.  As there is no SA in RDMAoE, the CMA
> code
> is modified to fill the necessary path record attributes locally before
> sending
> CM packets. Similarly, the CMA provides to the user the required address
> handle
> attributes when processing SIDR requests and joining multicast groups.
>
> In this patch set, an RDMAoE port is currently assigned a single GID,
> encoding
> the IPv6 link-local address of the corresponding netdev; the CMA RDMAoE
> code
> temporarily uses IPv6 link-local addresses as GIDs instead of the IP
> address
> provided by the user, thereby supporting any IP address. In addition,
> multicast
> packets currently use the broadcast MAC.
>
> To enable RDMAoE with the mlx4 driver stack, both the mlx4_en and mlx4_ib
> drivers must be loaded, and the netdevice for the corresponding RDMAoE port
> must be running. Individual ports of a multi port HCA can be independently
> configured as Ethernet (with support for RDMAoE) or IB, as is already the
> case.


How is port configuration (RDMAoE v. IB) accomplished ? Is it prior to boot
time or dynamic ?

-- Hal

<snip...>
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