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

[Woodruff, Robert J]

The possible value that I see would be:


  1.  There is a bug fix or enhancement that is contained to a vendor driver that the vendor wants to get to a customer without having to wait for the next distro release.
  2.  There is a bug fix in an older distro version and the vendor wants to provide their customer with an updated driver that fixes the bug. Even if the bug fix is available in a newer distro version, some customers do not want to upgrade to a newer distro version just to get a bug fix for one driver.
  3.  There are bug fixes or newer features in the latest user-space rdma-core or other user-space packages that someone wants.

The question is, do people in the EWG want to have a common OFED-lite package with all those updates or would they prefer to just deliver their own updated drivers to their customers which they can already do without any help for the EWG and OFED.

Woody

From: Davis, Arlin R <arlin.r.davis at intel.com>
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2020 2:57 PM
To: Vladimir Sokolovsky <vlad at dev.mellanox.co.il>; ewg at lists.openfabrics.org
Cc: Woodruff, Robert J <robert.j.woodruff at intel.com>
Subject: RE: OFA EWG Meeting: Monday, April 6th, 2020 - Agenda

Yes, updated drivers would be limited the in-kernel RDMA stack from the distro so we could not add new features, just provide bug fixing. I tend to agree, not much value, but I was asked to present the option to the working group. Clearly, we wouldn't move any faster than the distro, especially with their new commitment of a 6 month "predictable release cadence".

Maybe others can see value and can comment.


From: Vladimir Sokolovsky <vlad at dev.mellanox.co.il<mailto:vlad at dev.mellanox.co.il>>
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2020 12:02 PM
To: Davis, Arlin R <arlin.r.davis at intel.com<mailto:arlin.r.davis at intel.com>>; ewg at lists.openfabrics.org<mailto:ewg at lists.openfabrics.org>
Cc: Woodruff, Robert J <robert.j.woodruff at intel.com<mailto:robert.j.woodruff at intel.com>>
Subject: Re: OFA EWG Meeting: Monday, April 6th, 2020 - Agenda

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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