[openib-general] 2005 OpenIB Developers Workshop presentations

[Matt Leininger]

On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 23:45 -0800, Bill Thompson wrote:
> Hope everyone had a nice time in Sonoma.  Sorry I missed it... 
> 
> Got a question:
> 
> Can someone take a SWAG at when an OpenIB stack (OpenSM, OpenMPI,
> uDAPL, iSCSI, iSER, IPoIB, SDP, kDAPL) will be in RHE 4?
> 
> Now that could be CVS or Licensed from one of your companies...

  At the workshop a RedHat spokesperson mentioned that they want an
OpenIB stack the has multi-vendor support so your "licensed from one of
your companies" stack probably won't fly with RedHat.  

  This spokesperson also mentioned that RedHat would have pieces of
OpenIB in RHEL 4.  How much of the OpenIB stack get into RHEL 4 depends
on how far along we are.  I'd guess the initial RH release would have
support for IPoIB, with other ULPs being added as updates as they
stabilize on OpenIB.  It just depends on how long it takes to stabilize
the various components.  

  Open-MPI and uDAPL work can start once we have a user-space access
layer (verbs, cm, etc.).  Roland mentioned that this would be ready for
early testing in a couple of weeks.  Sandia and Los Alamos Labs will
then start adding OpenIB support to Open-MPI.  

  Several developers have volunteered to work on uDAPL.  The DAT
collaborative is working to get a GPL/BSD version of uDAPL to OpenIB.
James and Arkady from NetApp gave a DAT talk.  They mentioned needing 1
month to get the GPL code, and another month or two to fork the code
base.  I'm not sure why 2-3 months is needed to do this.  Perhaps James
and/or Arkady can comment.  I think we need to see the GPL/BSD uDAPL
code for OpenIB in the next couple of weeks.  Better to put the code in
the open so everyone can see what changes are required.  Same goes for
kDAPL.  Was the u/kDAPL implementation for OpenIB going to live at
openib.org or stay under cvs at the sourceforge dapl project?

I think iSCSI support will come from the Linux-iSCSI project on
SourceForge.  Libor has an SDP implementation for OpenIB that iSCSI can
use, but it still needs some tuning and features added.  There is also
the issue of Microsoft IP in SDP.  This was discussed at the workshop -
I thought is was moved to a BOF, but I didn't hear how that turned
out.  

iSER requires kDAPL.  The recent kDAPL discussions on this list and the
linux-iscsi-devel list point to several issues that need to be resolved
if kDAPL is ever going to have a chance of getting in the kernel.  

  Thanks,
	
	- Matt