[openib-general] NFS/RDMA for Linux: client and server update release 4

[Talpey, Thomas]

Network Appliance is pleased to announce release 4 of the NFS/RDMA
client and server for Linux 2.6.16.5. Following up on  the client release
of Feb 8 and client/server release of March 6, this update brings the
server to full protocol functionality (inline, read, write and reply chunks
are all supported), and completes the client memory registration
functionality to support multisegment scatter/gather.

These are both licensed under dual BSD/GPL2 terms, and available
at the project's Sourceforge site:

<http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfs-rdma/>

<http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=97628&package_id=188095>

As before, both client and server employ the native OpenFabrics RDMA
verbs API, and work equally for Infiniband and iWARP. They have been
tested on several Mellanox-based Infiniband cards, as well as the
Ammasso AMSO1100 and the Chelsio cxgb3 iWARP adapters.

The client and server implement the IETF draft protocol and fully
support direct (zero-copy, zero-touch) RDMA transfers at the RPC
layer. The performance is greatly improved, both client and server
are capable of performing operations in parallel with full RDMA offload.

Both the client and server have been tested with NFSv3 and pass
the Connectathon test suite. Additionally, they are able to run iozone
and network stress tests with good stability.

As in the previous versions, the patch procedure for applying the
changes requires the addition of certain framework components to
the Linux kernel, both for the OpenFabrics infrastructure and the RPC
transport switch. The package README has details.

Of course, we look forward to comments and feedback! Thanks again
for all of it so far.

Tom Talpey, for the various NFS/RDMA projects.