[ewg] Version of OFED in RHEL6?

[Jon Forrest]

On 4/22/2010 8:01 AM, Roland Dreier wrote:

> I think this whole discussion is kind of ridiculous.

I'm the OP. It might be naive but I don't think it's ridiculous,
for two reasons:

1) When I install CentOS 5 (and RHEL 5 I guess, although
I've never installed it) one of the choices I'm given
is whether I want to install OFED.

2) At the Open Fabrics Conference last month a talk
was given (see #1 below) that discussed what version
of OFED was going to be in what version of RHEL.

So, people much much wiser than me are telling
me that some distribution of OFED is contained in
RHEL. I'm the first to admit that I really don't
know what that means since I'm very new to IB.

> OFED is a
> distribution of RDMA software, with the kernel as one of its main
> upstream sources.  So you could ask what version of the kernel a given
> OFED release is based on.  But "getting OFED from the upstream kernel"
> is nonsense -- RHEL6 is getting RDMA drivers from the upstream kernel.

When I looked at an OFED 1.4 release, I saw a ton
of stuff that didn't look like it had much to do
with RDMA. For example, consider all the commands whose name
begins with "ib".

The reason I asked this in the first place is that
the cluster software package I use, Rocks, needs help
in how it supports IB. I was trying to do something
about this. One approach would be to just use whatever
comes with RHEL, but the talk mentioned below doesn't
say anything about what version of OFED this will be.

Getting up to speed with IB sure is difficult.

#1 
http://www.openfabrics.org/archives/spring2010sonoma/Tuesday/11.30%20Tziporet%20Koren%20OFED%20Linux%20Next%20Steps/2010-03-16-11.30-OFED_For_Linux_4.pptx

Cordially,
-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu