[ewg] ***SPAM*** Re: [ofa-general] EWG (OFED) meeting minutes for Mar 12 09

[Bart Van Assche]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Tziporet Koren <tziporet at mellanox.co.il> wrote:
> 1348    major   RHEL 5  amirv at mellanox.co.il    Sdp sockets doesnt closed after programs end

As far as I know SDP is currently implemented in OFED as a separate
address family (AF_INET_SDP). This is an unfortunate approach because:
* This approach will never be accepted upstream by the Linux kernel maintainers.
* The approach of of preloading a library in order to make
applications use SDP without modifying these applications is error
prone -- it is really hard to make such a library 100% correct.

When will work start on an SDP API that is acceptable for inclusion in
the mainstream Linux kernel ?

One possible approach is to extend the BSD socket API with support for
multiple IP stack implementations. This can be implemented by e.g.
adding a system call msocket() that has four parameters -- the three
classic socket() parameters and a fourth parameter for the IP stack.
See also http://wiki.virtualsquare.org/index.php/Multi_stack_support_for_Berkeley_Sockets
or http://www.fosdem.org/2009/schedule/events/ipn_msockets for a more
complete explanation.

A previous discussion about SDP can be found here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/netdev@vger.kernel.org/msg08546.html

Bart.