[ewg] OFA EWG Meeting: Monday, April 6th, 2020 - Agenda

[Vladimir Sokolovsky]

On 04/03/2020 09:16 PM, Davis, Arlin R wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> The recommendation from the OFA board is to move to a lite weight OFED 
> packaging option. This new packaging would simply update the vendors 
> drivers, rebased for distro’s compat_rdma kernel sub-system. It would 
> not replace the entire compat-rdma sub-system with latest upstream 
> kernel versions. Not sure how we handle the out of tree builds for 
> rdma_core in user-space, we may have to patch and rebuild entire package.
>
> Would this be an acceptable packaging option for your company? Would 
> there be any value without latest upstream compat-rdma stack?
>
> We will discuss this on Monday, or you can simply reply to the EWG 
> mailing list with your feedback.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arlin
>

Hi Arlin,
Can you elaborate on the meaning of "simply update the vendors drivers, 
rebased for distro’s compat_rdma kernel sub-system"? Isn't it already 
included in Distros?
In most cases vendor's driver cannot be updated without updating 
kernel's RDMA infrastructure which, in turn, will require other vendors 
drivers to be updated or disabled.
It is not clear which components OFED will include... For the user space 
there are only two options: use the in-box version (which means no new 
features) or replace the in-box version by the newer upstream version as 
of today.

Honestly, Distros are pretty up to date with the latest upstream 
changes, so that OFED release cycle is no shorter that most of the 
Distros release cycle. So, customers can get the latest updates just by 
upgrading to the new Distro version and this way they will continue to 
get support by Distros' vendors.
The added value of having community OFED was to provide support of the 
new features available upstream to older versions of Linux Distributions 
(when possible). But historically it did not really happened as most of 
the companies skipped on providing backports for their device drivers. 
So, it looses its value...

Other thoughts?

Regards,
Vladimir


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> *Agenda:*
> ·*OFED*_5.x – discuss options for OFED lite, with distro kernel sub-system


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