[openfabrics-ewg] Draft IBED Positioning Statement

[Shawn Hansen (shahanse)]

All,

Here is a draft message for submission to openib-general describing IBED
and how it relates to the OpenFabrics release. It is written in a Q&A
format.

Please review, and let's quickly drive to consensus on this. We will
discuss this in detail on the next EWG conference call, which needs to
be held before the next board meeting.

--Shawn

-----------------------------------------
All,

We are pleased to announce the creation of the InfiniBand Enterprise
Distribution (IBED), under the direction of the OpenFabrics Enterprise
Working Group.

IBED is a distribution of InfiniBand software that includes the
OpenFabrics 1.0 release, along with other additional software outside of
the scope of the release, such as MPI.

Frequently Asked Questions
--------------------------
Q: What is the Enterprise Working Group?
The EWG is a group of hardware vendors that will sell products based on
OpenFabrics.  The purpose of this group is to coordinate how to provide
a single commercially supportable distribution of OpenFabrics software
to their customers.

Q: Why is IBED required?
- Enterprise customers will have solution-level requirements that are
outside the scope of the 1.0 release, such as the distribution of MPI
stacks, support for a pre-2.6 kernel releases, etc.  The goal of IBED is
to address this need.  Without IBED, each InfiniBand vendor would create
their own distribution of OpenFabrics to accomplish this goal.

Q: Does IBED compete with the OpenFabrics release?
- No, there is only one OpenFabrics release.  IBED is a distribution
that includes the OpenFabrics 1.0 release. The OpenFabrics 1.0 release
and IBED share the same user-level code (libraries, management
utilities, etc.)  The code for both is taken from the 1.0 branch. 

Q: Is IBED development happening in the open?
- Yes, IBED uses the OpenFabrics bugzilla for bug reporting, and all
discussions can be viewed on the Enterprise Working Group mailing list.

Q: How does IBED differ from the OpenFabrics release?
- The OpenFabrics release contains only user-level code, while the IBED
distribution also adds kernel modules that are not part of the Linux
kernel (like iSER and RDS).
- IBED will include two MPI packages that are not part of Open Fabrics:
OSU MPI and Open MPI.
- IBED is packaged for end-user installation.
- IBED supports distribution with older kernels (e.g. Redhat EL4 up2)

Q: What is the software release process for IBED and how does it relate
to the OpenFabrics release?
- Insert here.

Q: What is the anticipated release schedule?
- Insert date here.

Q: What components will be included in IBED and how is this decided?
- Insert here.