[ofa-general] Re: [PATCH 0/2] Opensm support for external routing engines

[Sasha Khapyorsky]

On 15:54 Thu 18 Jun     , Vincent Ficet wrote:
> The idea is to include non-open source routing algorithms into opensm on
> demand, which is permitted by the BSD license.

It is permitted, but I don't think that we as open source community
need to support such efforts.

I'm not a lawyer and cannot say for sure, but maybe in the case of dual
GPL/BSD license choice you will need anyway to relicense and to
redistribute OpenSM for doing this.

> It also enables to try a new algorithm on the fly without having to
> reinstall opensm, which can prove useful on a running cluster.

Even with your patches you will need to restart OpenSM, so it should not
be a big deal to build and run OpenSM even on a running cluster
especially if you are going to experiment with new routing engines.
Alternatively you can load routing tables from file.

> The event-based perfmgr plugin does not make it easy to integrate a new
> routing algorithm because the list of available routing algorithms is
> statically declared.

Eventually it is only link list with names and callbacks. It should be
easy to add new entry there.

> AFAIK, the latest Voltaire UFM also includes or will include proprietary
> routing algorithms (mesh + fat tree), so it could also be useful for
> Voltaire.

I don't know about this, but even if it is so. It is not our charter as
open source project to care about such practices and they (UFM) will need
to support their stuff by themselves.

Sasha