[Rdma-developers] Re: [openib-general] OpenIB and OpenRDMA: Convergence on common RDMAAPIs and ULPs for Linux

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 09:36:09AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> For (1) doing a proper RDMA stack should solve thing, and the discussion
> how to do it is already ongoing on this list.  Once we have proper RMDA
> stack that part of KDAPL isn't needed at all anymore.  The second is
> more interesting and there's indeed the need for some higher level
> helpers than the API at the level of the current OpenIB code offers. But
> having a separate layer, with different data structures, provider
> registration and a totally different API for that is utter nonsense.
> Instead the higher level helpers should operate on the same
> datastructures as the RDMA stack, or build new ones ontop of that.
> In addition some of the abstractions don't make much sense, the event
> handling has already been mentioned.

That beeing said, one of the first thing you should get rid of if you
want to be able to take code from kdapl to the generic rdma code is way
it deals with handles.  The kdapl code gives up language type safety
just to add its own bandaided type system below.  Please always pass the
real struct pointer around, or at least the generic struct type which
might be embedded into a bigger structure, and get rid of all the magic
number checking and magic macros that expect special members at the
beginning of all objects behind these handles.