[openfabrics-ewg] RHEL5 and OFED ...

[Doug Ledford]

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 15:08 -0700, Betsy Zeller wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 15:26 -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
> > 
> > Yeah, I can send something through.  Any idea what they 
> > are looking for?
> 
> Thanks! Something like "The next Beta (or RC) for RHEL5 is targeted for
> XX/XX/XX, and it will include the YYY version of OFED. Product release
> of RHEL5 is targeted for XX/XX/XX, and it is currently planned to
> include the ZZZ version of OFED.

Well, as per Red Hat policy, I'm not allowed to provide dates for
things.  Indeed, on an open mailing list I shouldn't even hint at dates.

That being said, Beta1, our first public beta, has been out on RHN for a
while now.  We do rolling updates to the beta during the beta period so
testers can test the latest software without waiting for the next beta.

Once we go to beta, the release is basically frozen except for targeted
bug fixes.  We are not allowed to do wholesale updates after beta.

> I know Matt L. is hoping very much that "ZZZ" in the above will be "OFED
> 1.1".

Sorry.  RHEL5 Beta1 has been out for a while, but OFED 1.1 still isn't
done yet.  Obviously, I wasn't able to get something in RHEL5 that
didn't even exist prior to freeze.

But just being done by my freeze date isn't sufficient either.  After
you finish a release, I still have to rewrite and/or rip out the
extraneous stuff for other OSes or OS versions that shouldn't be in our
official release.  Everything we ship needs to be Linux FHS compliant,
which means I have to do independent verification that things work when
they are placed in the right place instead of in /usr/local.  We require
that on multilib arches (x86_64, ppc64, s390x, ia64) both the default
and the optional arch versions install cleanly with no file conflicts,
that we support running either arch variant of program, and that when
you install both arch variants of the -devel packages you can compile
for either arch successfully.  In addition, since lam is still available
in our distribution, openmpi and lam must be able to coexist on the same
system and each operate properly.

All these things take time and they can't be ignored since failure to be
consistent in our shipped software would have a serious negative impact
on the end user experience.

So, all that being said, I don't think there is much chance at all that
I could convince the powers that be to allow me to wholesale update
RHEL5 to OFED 1.1 at this point.  On the other hand, I can probably get
OFED 1.2 into RHEL5.1 since that's still so far away.  I can probably
also get OFED 1.1 into RHEL4.5 since that isn't frozen yet.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband
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