[ewg] Re: [ofw] SC'09 BOF - Meeting notes

[Or Gerlitz]

Richard Frank <richard.frank at oracle.com> wrote:

> How can 1500 lines out of 240k lines be a big change.. do I have these numbers right
>  - is the big change you are referring too?

Rick, the change set is way not self contained but rather touches
various parts of the core IB stack (rdma-cm module, ib address
resolution module, ib uverbs module and even the mad module) and
ofcourse some of the kernel and user space IB hw specific libraries.

> What is the risk area that you are worried about .. do you think it will break current
>  transports or existing ULPs?

yes, this would be simply not supportable, think about that, you want
to hand your customers with a code which didn't pass review nor
acceptance by the Linux IB stack maintainers (Roland and Sean), say,
next a crash happens at this or that module / line, next, what you
except the maintainers to do?

> If it's just about how the implementation is done.. can this be resolved concurrently with
> getting the bits available for evaluation now..

an rdmaoe branch at the git tree was set and an releases are
maintained, its all what you need for evaluation, five lines later
you're talking on deployments...

> As RoCEE is totally transparent to existing ULPs.. any potential changes
> would not be visible.. and therefore not an issue for ULP / clients going forward.. right?

this is how you see things, since the IBTA IBXoE annex isn't released,
you just don't know what would be the bottom line.

> Oracle would like to see RoCEE get into 1.5

you guys have set a note to the rds developer community that that
Oracle recently moved from 1.3.x to 1.4.y, no special work is expected
on 1.5.z and that you have lots of plans for 1.6.w ... what's the
urgency to get these bits into 1.5?

> We are testing with RoCEE now and plan to deploy it fairly soon.. in very large configuratio

the proposed patch set doesn't let you use non zero VLAN, aren't you
expecting Ethernet customers to trivially require that? also you can't
use non zero traffic class (priority bits), where all the IBXoE
materials are talking about how much working on a lossless traffic
class is a must... if indeed this is the case, the patch set is
useless without the ability to specify a traffic class, as CEE
switches would typically (always?) set only some of the traffic
classes to be lossless (e.g the ones used for FCoE, IBXoE) and the
rest to be lossy


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