[ewg] RE: OFED Jan 5, 2009 meeting minutes on OFED plans

[Woodruff, Robert J]

Doug wrote,

>I'm not so much concerned over IBTA standards.  I'm concerned over what
>makes it into the upstream linux kernels.  How much OFED's kernel
>differs from the upstream kernel directly impacts supportability of the
>OFED stack in our products.  The more it diverges, the higher the
>support load.  We actively control that divergence as a result.

In general, we discussed and decided at the last developer's workshop
in Sonoma to try to make sure that any new features that were going
into OFED be first accepted for inclusion in the upstream kernel, or
at least queued in Roland's tree for upstream.
I think we did a pretty good job in OFED 1.4 of adhering to that
process, or at least we made significant progress towards that goal.

We did this specifically to try to prevent major divergence between the
upstream kernel and the OFED kernel. So for a major new feature like
IBoE, I think it makes sense to first discuss the patches on ofa-general
and perhaps even a RFC on kernel.org before we include it into an OFED
release.

my 2 cents,

woody