[openib-general] [PATCH]proposal for enabling partial ports on HCA

[Roland Dreier]

    Shirley> One HCA could support 256 ports. The current
    Shirley> implementation doesn't support partially successful
    Shirley> ports, which would be a waste if any of the port
    Shirley> failure.

What does "port failure" mean?  If it just means that the port is not
active, then I think the drivers should still be able to use the
port.  I don't know of anything in the IB spec that says a port can
only be used if its link is up.

It seems fantastically unlikely that we'll some HCA failure that means
a particular port can never be used but the rest of the HCA continues
to work.  So I don't think it's worth spending time on that either.

Right now my feeling is that we don't want to add the complication
entailed by having to track individual HCA ports, just to work around
a certain hardware/firmware quirk (which I would argue is in fact a bug).

 - R.