[ewg] Notes from Sonoma OFED/Distros BOF

[Betsy Zeller]

There were several discussions at Sonoma covering OFED, and how we can
improve the integration of OFED into the distros. Here are the notes
from the BOF we ran. Other BOF attendees, please add anything I missed.

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Proposals people offered included:

1) Don’t ship MPIs with OFED (need to get buyin from MVAPICH team)

2) Ensure that user level libraries and ship in OFED reflect what is in
the maintainers version of the code

3) If a HW vendor ships a slightly different version of SW from what is
in OFED release, give it a different release identifier, preferably one
which indicates the company making the change, so there are no
conflicts.

4) If the contents of any tarball changes, the version number of that
tarball needs to change as well. The fact that this is not universally
true makes it much more difficult for the distro vendors to make sure
they have the right software in their release.

5) One person suggested that we package the userland and kernel
components of OFED, *minus* the hardware drivers. That way, any vendor
could take a tested version of OFED, and ship a new release of their
driver to go with it.

6) There are 231 bugs open against pre OFED 1.4.1 releases. If you
opened a bug on a previous release, please check to see if it is there
with OFED 1.4.1. If it isn't, please close the bug. If it is, please
update the bug to indicate that it is still there.


Actions we agreed on included:

1) Identify all user components which are not packaged as tarballs and
notify them that it will be a condition of inclusion in OFED 1.5 that
they are packaged as tarballs.


2) Ensure that each of the tarballs for OFED 1.5 has a unique version
number, and that version numbers are updated appropriately as the
tarball contents change.  

3) Ensure that each use level component that depends on specific kernel
feature actually checks for the existence of that kernel feature, and
politely declines to compile/install if that component is not available.

4)  Investigate making the OFED install work as non-root – Doug has
offered tutorials using BUILD_ROOT and chroot mechanisms to do non-root
builds.

Betsy