[ewg] Re: [ofa-general] OFED Jan 28 meeting summary onRC3readiness

[Doug Ledford]

On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 10:07 -0800, Sean Hefty wrote:
> >In all fairness, the kernel portion of all of this, and the process of
> >getting things into Linus' kernel, has *always* been a case of staging
> >things in Roland's tree and then merging upstream.  So, at least for the
> >kernel, that's mostly true as OFED is pretty close to Roland's tree
> >generally speaking.  As for the user space packages though, you guys
> >*are* the upstream.  There's no one to merge upstream to and very little
> >oversight by anyone.  So, it's entirely up to all of you just how much
> >your package seems to be a feature of the day change-athon versus a
> >solid, stable program.
> 
> I don't believe that this is the model actually in use.  OFED has accepted
> kernel features that have not been submitted for upstream inclusion, or, in some
> cases, that were, but were rejected.  (For examples, see local SA, SA event
> subscription, XRC, SDP, and some of the previous incarnations of IPoIB CM.)
> There are thousands of lines of code difference between OFED and the kernel upon
> which it's based.  (To be clear, I'm not objecting to any changes, just the
> sheer volume.)
> 
> The OFED releases of the userspace libraries are not identical to those provided
> by the maintainers.  (See libibverbs.)  Whose version of libibverbs does RedHat
> plan on using?  How do you manage the differences between OFED and Roland's
> libibverbs libraries?
> 
> And I'm really not trying to come across harsh here, but if the distros are
> willing to pull the OFED code, why should OFA bother trying to merge anything
> upstream? 

I pull *some* OFED code.  I don't pull it all.  There are things in OFED
I won't accept until they've gone upstream.  Hence, RDS is not in our
offering.  We made the mistake of taking SDP long ago and we'll carry
that forward, but we generally look for things to be upstream before
pulling them from OFED at this point (or at least have been submitted
upstream and is being worked towards acceptance).

In terms of user space, given a choice between a released tarball or the
custom OFED tarball, I choose the released tarball.  So, I currently
have Roland's libibverbs, libmthca, and libmlx4.

-- 
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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