[ofa-general] help install ofed 1.4 on Centos 5.2

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 10:15:08AM -0400, Brian J. Murrell wrote:

> This is a problem we run into with Lustre somewhat frequently.
> 
> The issue is that deploying OFED 1.5 (i.e. beta software) in a
> production environment is completely unacceptable, yet leaving one's
> systems open to kernel vulnerabilities is equally unacceptable.

Why aren't you just using the IB support directly in RH 5.4?

>From the release notes:

8.3.1. Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) Drivers

The OpenFabrics Alliance Enterprise Distribution (OFED) is a
collection of Infiniband and iWARP hardware diagnostic utilities, the
Infiniband fabric management daemon, Infiniband/iWARP kernel module
loader, and libraries and development packages for writing
applications that use Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
technology. Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses the OFED software stack as
its complete stack for Infiniband/iWARP/RDMA hardware support.  In Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, the following portions of OFED have been
updated to the upstream version 1.4.1-rc3

    * Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) headers (BZ#476301)
    * Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) protocol (BZ#477065, BZ#506907)
    * Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) (BZ#476301)
    * SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) (BZ#476301)
    * IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB) (BZ#434779, BZ#466086, BZ#506907) 

Additionally, the following OFED drivers have been updated to the
upstream version 1.4.1-rc3:

    * The cxgb3 and iw_cxgb3 drivers for the Chelsio T3 Family of network devices (BZ#476301, BZ#504906)
    * The driver for mthca-based InfiniBand HCA (Host Channel Adapter) (BZ#476301, BZ#506097)
    * qlgc_vnic driver (BZ#476301) 

> By not backporting support for current kernels to the latest stable OFED
> release you are putting people between a rock and a hard place.

OFED has an identity problem. Many people seem to think it is a back
port project, but it isn't run that way. It is more like an upstream
fork, testing effort and backport project rolled into one.

Jason