[openib-general] [PATCH 0/6] Tranport Neutral Verbs Proposal.

[Greg Lindahl]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 10:24:11AM -0500, Steve Wise wrote:

> However, the IETF RDMA protocol defines SEND as well as READ, WRITE,
> etc.  So in my mind, that's all RDMA, not just read and write.

Well, most people think RDMA means RDMA. The RDMA protocol undoubtedly
defines SEND/RECV because it's needed in addition to RDMA to get good
performance. But trying to call all of that RDMA is a marketing slogan.

Here's why it's a problem: I've repeatedly seen people try to use RDMA
(get and put) all the time because they think it must be faster than
simple send and receive... that's what the slogans tell them. But then
they discover that they need to use ordinary SEND/RECV for shorter
messages and for conversations with a lot of participants. That's a
technical screwup caused by the marketing slogan.

Let's pick symbol names that match our organization name.

I'm a bit dissappointed that several of you who were at the last
Sonoma conference forgot we discussed this in a public session right
before the name change. I am not on the steering committee, and
wouldn't be surprised if the openrdma domain name issue was the big
decider in the name choice, but the wisdom of having RDMA in our name
was in doubt for more reasons than just that.

-- g