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

[Jeff Squyres]

+1 on Roland's and Woody's comments.

There is a difference between the *desirability* of a new feature and  
the speed to which it should be pushed out to an enterprise/production- 
quality software stack.

1. We're at rc2.  Major changes to the core shouldn't even be on the  
table.

2. Both Roland and Or have identified critical questions that *must*  
be answered satisfactorily.  Until they are, this feature cannot be  
considered anything other than "experimental".

Although many of us would like to see this feature in main-line  
distributions ASAP, prudence and caution are much, much better in the  
long run.

Just my $0.02.



On Nov 19, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Woodruff, Robert J wrote:

>
> Or wrote,
>
> >> get the RDMAoE code into 1.5, marked as evaluation if that is  
> EWG's assessment
> >> rather than push it off to 1.6. This is important technology that  
> should not be held back
>
> >> It would be great if RoCEE were part of 1.5 even if it were
> >> listed as "evaluation".. for now.
>
> >> this is leading edge technology, so saying that it is for early  
> evaluation is appropriate
>
> >what is the thing you want to list as "evaluation" the whole ofed
> >version or the rdmaoe part of it? in case you refer to the latter,
> >this is impossible, since the rdmaoe patch set touches various areas
> >of the IB stack code and is way not self contained, so the whole IB
> >stack becomes "for evaluation", this stack is developed since June
> >2004 and maintained in the kernel since early 2005, over the last  
> year
> >we see more and more people (e.g from the FSI market) looking and
> >delpolying IB, as the technology and code became enterprise ready. Do
> >you really want that after five years in January 2010 this stack will
> >become experimental? why?
>
> >Or.
>
> There are already 2 complete branches of OFED-1.5, one
> with and one without the RDMAoE code. This includes daily builds
> and complete installer for each branch.  So what I would
> suggest is that the OFED-1.5 code
>
> http://www.openfabrics.org/~vlad/builds/ofed-1.5/
>
> be used for the production OFED-1.5 release and the ofed-rdmaoe-1.5  
> code tar balls
>
> http://www.openfabrics.org/~vlad/builds/ofed-rdmaoe-1.5/
>
> be considered evaluation" or "experimental" for OFED-1.5 and until  
> all of the
> technical issues that the maintainers have raised with the RDMAoE  
> code are resolved.
>
> Since the RDMAoE code touches so many of the core components and is  
> not just an isolated
> component that could be marked as experimental within one OFED-1.5  
> tar ball, I
> think we need to continue to have the two complete banches, daily  
> builds, and tar balls
> for each branch, as we have now.
>
>
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-- 
Jeff Squyres
jsquyres at cisco.com