[ewg] Version of OFED in RHEL6?

[Roland Dreier]

 > > 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,

Yes, I wasn't replying to your original question.  Just the continuing
discussion seemed silly -- once the answer "RHEL6 won't contain OFED"
came, continuing to ask, "OK, but what version of OFED will it contain?"
is ridiculous I think.

 > > 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".

Sorry, I was using "RDMA" as a generic term to cover both iWARP and
InfiniBand.  It's true that OFED contains a lot of stuff not strictly
having to do with "remote direct memory access."

 > 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.

Yes, this shows all the unfortunate confusion caused by trying to
"brand" OFED as something special.  What version of, say, the IP stack
does RHEL contain?  You don't care, right?  In general, RHEL is going to
contain version XYZ of the kernel, plus patches A, B, C, along with
version UVW of libfoo and version MNO of libbar, etc.  The
InfiniBand/RDMA world shouldn't be special -- the rest of the world
deals with that just fine, without having to tie RHEL's versioning to
someone else's distribution.
-- 
Roland Dreier <rolandd at cisco.com> || For corporate legal information go to:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/index.html