[openib-general] [ANNOUNCE] Contribute RDS(ReliableDatagramSockets) to OpenIB

[Rick Frank]

Yes, the application is responsible for detecting lost msgs at the application level - the transport can not do this.

RDS does not guarantee that a message has been delivered to the application - just that once the transport has accepted a msg it will deliver the msg to the remote node in order without duplication - dealing with retransmissions, etc due to sporadic / intermittent msg loss over the interconnect. If after accepting the send - the current path fails - then RDS will transparently fail over to another path - and if required will resend / send any already queued msgs to the remote node - again insuring that no msg is duplicated and they are in order.  This is no different than APM - with the exception that RDS can do this across HCAs. 

The application - Oracle in this case - will deal with detecting a catastrophic path failure - either due to a send that does not arrive and or a timedout response or send failure returned from the transport. If there is no network path to a remote node - it is required that we remove the remote node from the operating cluster to avoid what is commonly termed as a "split brain" condition - otherwise known as a "partition in time".

BTW - in our case - the application failure domain logic is the same whether we are using UDP /  uDAPL / iTAPI / TCP / SCTP / etc. Basically, if we can not talk to a remote node - after some defined period of time - we will remove the remote node from the cluster. In this case the database will recover all the interesting state that may have been maintained on the removed node - allowing the remaining nodes to continue. If later on, communication to the remote node is restored - it will be allowed to rejoin the cluster and take on application load. 


----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael Krause 
  To: Ranjit Pandit 
  Cc: openib-general at openib.org 
  Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 4:08 PM
  Subject: Re: [openib-general] [ANNOUNCE] Contribute RDS(ReliableDatagramSockets) to OpenIB


  At 12:33 PM 11/8/2005, Ranjit Pandit wrote:

    > Mike wrote:
    >  - RDS does not solve a set of failure models.  For example, if a RNIC / HCA
    > were to fail, then one cannot simply replay the operations on another RNIC /
    > HCA without extracting state, etc. and providing some end-to-end sync of
    > what was really sent / received by the application.  Yes, one can recover
    > from cable or switch port failure by using APM style recovery but that is
    > only one class of faults.  The harder faults either result in the end node
    > being cast out of the cluster or see silent data corruption unless
    > additional steps are taken to transparently recover - again app writers
    > don't want to solve the hard problems; they want that done for them.

    The current reference implementation of RDS solves the HCA failure case as well.
    Since applications don't need to keep connection states, it's easier
    to handle cases like HCA and intermediate path failures.
    As far as application is concerned, every sendmsg 'could' result in a
    new connection setup in the driver.
    If the current path fails, RDS reestablishes a connection, if
    available, on a different port or a different HCA , and replays the
    failed messages.
    Using APM is not useful because it doesn't provide failover across HCA's.

  I think others may disagree about whether RDS solves the problem.  You have no way of knowing whether something was received or not into the other node's coherency domain without some intermediary or application's involvement to see the data arrived.  As such, you might see many hardware level acks occur and not know there is a real failure.  If an application takes any action assuming that send complete means it is delivered, then it is subject to silent data corruption.  Hence, RDS can replay to its heart content but until there is an application or middleware level of acknowledgement, you have not solve the fault domain issues.  Some may be happy with this as they just cast out the endnode from the cluster / database but others see the loss of a server as a big deal so may not be happy to see this occur.  It really comes down to whether you believe loosing a server is worth while just for a local failure event which is not fatal to the rest of the server.

  APM's value is the ability to recover from link failure.  It has the same value for any other ULP in that it recovers transparently to the ULP.

  Mike 


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