[ewg] [RFC] – Proposal for new process for OFED releases

[Bart Van Assche]

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Tziporet Koren <tziporet at mellanox.com>wrote:

>
> We propose a new process for the OFED releases starting from next OFED
> release:
> - OFED content will be the relevant kernel.org modules and user space
> released packages
> - OFED will offer only backports to the distros  (no fixes)
> - OFED package will be used for easy installation of all packages in a
> friendly manner
>
> The main goals of this change:
> 1. Ensure OFED and the upstream kernel are the same
> 2. Provide customers a way to use the new features in latest kernels on
> existing distros
> 3. OFED qualification will contribute to the stability of the upstream code
>
> We think that at this point of the RDMA technology maturity this is the
> right way to go.
> In this way OFED is not conflicting with the kernel or the distros, and
> still provide a valuable value for early adopters of new features.
>
> Versions:
> We suggest that the OFED version will be the same as kernel.org
> For example, for kernel 3.2 the OFED release would be OFED-3.2.
> This would make it easy for people to associate the OFED code with the
> corresponding kernel.org code.
>
> Some open questions that we should consider:
> - How to handle experimental features?
> - Need to follow up kernel stable releases if bug fixes are relevant to
> OFA modules
> - Should we have a release for every kernel release (I think yes)
> - What should we do with modules like SDP that are not in kernel?
>
> Comments and responses are welcome
>

Personally I would appreciate it a lot if everything that is not a kernel
module would be moved out of the kernel-ib RPM. That would make it a lot
easier to use the OFED user space components in combination with upstream
or distro-provided kernel IB modules. The relevant files are:

# rpm -ql kernel-ib | grep -v lib/modules
/etc/infiniband
/etc/infiniband/connectx.conf
/etc/infiniband/info
/etc/infiniband/openib.conf
/etc/init.d/openibd
/etc/modprobe.d/ib_ipoib.conf
/etc/modprobe.d/mlx4_en.conf
/etc/udev/rules.d/90-ib.rules
/sbin/connectx_port_config
/sbin/sysctl_perf_tuning
/usr/bin/ibdev2netdev

Bart.
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