[ofa-general] Re: Location and naming of RDMA stack enablement rpm

[Roland Dreier]

 > Right now, in the OFED packaging, there are extra files added to the
 > overall stack that aren't currently part of any base RPM.  I'm mainly
 > talking about things like the /etc/udev.d/rules/90-ib.rules,
 > /etc/init.d/openibd, etc.  These files belong to none of the upstream
 > rpms, yet they (or administrator hand edited equivalents) are required
 > for the stack to work well.
 > 
 > Since both prior to the IB/iWARP merge and after, libibverbs is
 > required for most functionality to operate at all, I would propose
 > that those basic startup files be included in the libibverbs rpm.

That doesn't make sense to me.  For example, the udev rules really
belong in whatever distro package supplies the rest of the udev rules.
Similarly, it doesn't make sense to me to have a startup script in
libibverbs, since libibverbs has nothing to do with what's being
started.

There are a couple of reasons why I feel this way.  First, it's
completely sane to have a system that only runs an SM, or SDP/libsdp,
or something like that -- and in that case there's no reason to
install libibverbs at all.  Second, I don't want to maintain unrelated
distribution-specific stuff in libibverbs just because it's a
convenient dumping ground.

My solution would be to create a package to hold all the miscellaneous
stuff, maybe something like openfabrics-base-support, and then make
the other packages depend on that so it gets installed when it needs to.

 > So, on top of proposing that these items go into libibverbs, I'd like
 > to request that we reach a consensus on what name to use in /etc for
 > consolidating these config files and put all the reasonably related
 > config files in that directory.  For example, the dat.conf should go
 > in there, as well as opensm.conf, libsdp.conf, and openibd.conf.
 > However, I would not recommend placing the various mpi config files
 > under there as these are fully functional, stand alone applications
 > that can run with or without the RDMA stack underneath it.
 > 
 > That being said, I'll say that my preference for the name of the
 > directory is /etc/ofa.  I prefer ofa over ofed because eventually this
 > stack should be buildable package by package without doing a big
 > conglomerate build of everything.  In fact, I'm currently going
 > through git repos and making changes to the head of each repo to
 > enable the packages to be built easily by themselves via rpm spec file
 > rules. Under that sort of build environment, ofed is misleading while
 > ofa is accurate.

I think it makes sense to get rid of the name /etc/ofed.  I would
suggest /etc/openfabrics instead of /etc/ofa, since it's more
self-explanatory -- if I see /etc/ofa it's not instantly obvious who's
responsible for it.

I'll add as a note that these issues seem to come from the continuing
confusion between a "release" and a "distribution", and that things
would be a lot clearer if there were an upstream openfabrics release
that both OFED, Red Hat, etc could package according to their own needs.
(Although the /etc/ directory name should be decided outside of the
distributions so that there's some uniformity)

 - R.