[ewg] vendor supplied iser CANNOT be used with OFED 1.5

[Brian J. Murrell]

Hi,

There is a bug (1764) which has been closed WONTFIX as well as a
discussion in the thread at
http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/ewg/2009-October/013958.html
about iser and OFED 1.5.

The gist of all of it is that the ISER in OFED 1.5 is supported only by
kernels 2.6.30+ (there is no backport for kernels < 2.6.30).  The thread
meandered into the territory of what a, say, RHEL5 user is supposed to
do and it was recommended (in
http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/ewg/2009-October/013980.html)
that he should use the RedHat supplied iSCSI stack.  It was also
reported in the same message by Or, that (unsurprisingly) the vendor
supplied iSCSI stack doesn't load with OFED 1.5 supplied as an external
(set of) module(s) as it produces symbol mismatch errors.  This is my
current experience:

ib_iser: disagrees about version of symbol ib_fmr_pool_unmap
ib_iser: Unknown symbol ib_fmr_pool_unmap
ib_iser: disagrees about version of symbol ib_create_cq
ib_iser: Unknown symbol ib_create_cq
ib_iser: disagrees about version of symbol rdma_resolve_addr
ib_iser: Unknown symbol rdma_resolve_addr

To be fair, in the same message (above) it was reported that modprobe
with -f will load the iser module.  modprobe does not by default use the
(-f) force switch so during automatic module loading, iser still fails
to load and requires user intervention to force it to load.

Also, in that same above message, Or reported that he would do further
investigation on this "and think a bit".

Nothing more was done.  Now we are left with this "hacky" solution of
having to force load the iser module, with who knows what repercussions.
Was the use of this force loading for older kernels such as RHEL5 tested
in the QA process for OFED 1.5 and certified to be non-harmful to the
combination of the vendor iSCSI stack with OFED 1.5?  How about other
distros with kernels < 2.6.30?

b.
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