[ewg] EWG/OFED meeting agenda for today (Dec 13, 2011)

[Tziporet Koren]

Meeting Agenda:

OFED 1.5.4:
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1. OFED 1.5.4 GA released ☺
2. We may need 1.5.4.1 – for critical issues – need to decide when

New OFED releases:
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1. Approve the new approach of having OFED based on kernel code + backports and packaging.
    Release names: will be the same as the kernel.

2. Assuming this is approved (we had very positive comments from EWG and Linux-rdma lists) this is the way we suggest to build it:

* User space:
	OFED will contain the library tarballs provided by the maintainers.
	This will enable support for non-RPM based distros (such as Ubuntu)
	For RPM based OSes (e.g. Redhat/SuSE) the install script will create the SRPMs on the fly - so the outcome will be the same as today.
	Notes: 
	- MPI implementations will not be included in OFED anymore.
	- We wish to remove packages without maintainers (e.g. qperf)

* Kernel:
	Kernel code will be taken from RCs or GA of the kernel
	Git trees:
	- kernel git tree will be mirrored to OFA server - just for ease of use (all other git trees will be there too)
	- sdp - git tree for SDP - will be a different package
	- kernel-backports - for all backports (as today)
	- kernel-scripts (e.g. openibd)

* OFED:
	- docs git tree
	- scripts git tree (e.g. install, build etc.)

* Build:
	The build script will take all the above and will create the OFED package

Schedule for first release:
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Target to have the first release based on kernel 3.2 - thus next OFED will be OFED 3.2

Schedule:
* First package supporting only kernel.org - Jan 5
* Backport for SLES 11 SP2 - Jan 12
* Backport for RHEL 6.2 - Jan 19
* GA: I suggest we will decide on it after we have the distros support since not clear to me how much time it will take to GA with the new approach.

Open: 
* Can we skip RHEL 5.x support? It may be complicated since it’s a very old kernel base (2.6.18)
* Which other OSes we should support?
* To which kernel.org we should have backports if any?

Experimental features:
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In general we will enable a way to have branches with experimental features.
But I prefer to focus on having first package now and find the technical solution for the experimental features later.


Tziporet