[ewg] Re: [ofa-general] OFED Jan 28 meeting summary on RC3 readiness

[Kossey, Robert]

Conversely, there are some vendors who will *not* support OFED from a 
distro, but only a version they supply and control.  The customers I 
work with are more sensitive to performance, as well as quick turnaround 
for bug fixes, so having the latest releases, and being able to update 
them quickly is critical. 
I agree that for other customers, a more slowly changing supported stack 
is suitable.  These may also be the same customers more likely to use 
10GE.  I agree more discussion and adjustment is needed for OFED to be 
able to balance the needs of the spectrum of users, from the latest 
kernel.org users, IB vendor based users and distro based users.

Bob

Parks Fields wrote:
> At 09:16 PM 1/30/2008, Chet Mehta wrote:
>
>> Robert,
>>
>> In response to your question......
>> > A more general question I would like to ask the group is how many 
>> people use OFED from the RH or SUSE distros as
>> > is, as compared with using OFED releases from other sources like 
>> the IB vendors, or building their own from  
>> > openfabrics.org?  We use RH distros, but to this point, the OFED 
>> support provided in RH distros has lagged    
>> > behind the latest releases available from openfabrics.org.  This is 
>> not to fault Red Hat, but OFED is still
>> > changing too rapidly, with minor point releases and bug fixes, for 
>> a distro to keep up.  I think many of us hope
>> > that someday that will not be the case, but appears to be true for 
>> the foreseeable future.  Right now, our mode
>> > of operation is to remove whatever IB support comes in the distro 
>> and replace it, so it does not help us to
>> > delay  OFED 1.3 to get a particular bug fix in a distro. 
>
>
> We have found that there are some vendors who dictate that they will 
> only support a Distro EX: RHXXX.   Then if you layer the latest OFED 
> on top, then the support is nullified. Or to get any bug fixes or 
> support you have to uninstall the what you did and repeat the 
> bug/error. SO I think it is very important to keep the Distros very 
> close the latest OFED stack.
>
>
>
>
>> I believe the question that should be asked is "'How many IB 
>> customers would like to use the OFED distribution if provided by the 
>> distro?"  The answer at least for the customer set we deal with is 
>> pretty much unanimous. The fact is that customers are already dealing 
>> with a distro for their base OS so obtaining the interconnect code & 
>> support from the same sources is highly desirable. When OpenIB was 
>> new (in 2004/5) and "common" IB code was still in its infancy, the 
>> customer set was tolerant of 'build your own' or vendor provided 
>> distribution mechanism. However if IB is to become a ubiquitous 
>> interconnect, we in OFA have to strive to tailor our deliverables to 
>> meet distro requirements. Until we do that, IB will have difficultly 
>> gaining broader market acceptance.
>>
>> Just my perspective.
>>
>> :Chet.
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