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<TITLE>IBTA Management Working Group: Extending SubnMgmt attributes</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Dear IB Management Developer,</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">This mail serves as a notice to the IB management developers community.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">During its work the MgtWG has discovered some of the SubnMgmt class attributes were defined such that</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">the space after the last attribute component was not explicitly reserved.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">This space is important to allow extension of existing attributes with new optional components </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">- enabling future enhancements to the specification.</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Although the use of the "spare" space was ratified by IBTA committees the MgtWG decided to </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">approach the developer community before the first standardized extension makes use of that space.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Not only the SubnMgmt attribute (e.g. SwitchInfo) will get extended, but it's occurrences in the </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">response SubnAdmin Record (e.g. SwitchInfoRecord) needs to be updated too.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Note that the existing specification enables modification of the size of the embedded attributes - by defining </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">the AttributeOffset component of the RMPP header. But it is the implementation of the RMPP requestor and </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">responder responsibility to coordinate the new size of the attributes.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Please send feedback to mgtwg@infinibandta.org or directly to me.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Thanks</FONT>
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<P><B><I><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=6 FACE="Monotype Corsiva">Eitan Zahavi</FONT></I></B><I></I><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"><BR>
</FONT><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Tahoma">IBTA MgtWG Co-Chair</FONT>
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