[ofa-general] Re: [OMPI devel] OMPI over ofed udapl - bugs opened

[Steve Wise]

On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 16:15 -0700, Andrew Friedley wrote:
> 
> Steve Wise wrote:
> > There have been a series of discussions on the ofa general list about
> > this issue, and the conclusion to date is that it cannot be resolved in
> > the rdma-cm or iwarp-cm code of the linux rdma stack.  Mainly because
> > sending an RDMA message involves the ULP's work queue and completion
> > queue, so the CM cannot do this under the covers in a mannor that
> > doesn't affect the application.  Thus, the applications must deal with
> > this.
> 
> Why can't uDAPL deal with this?  As a uDAPL user, I really don't care 
> what API uDAPL is using under the hood to move data from one place to 
> another, nor the quirks of that API.  The whole point of uDAPL is to 
> form a network-agnostic abstraction layer.  AFAIK, the uDAPL spec 
> doesn't enforce any such requirement on RDMA communication either.  In 
> my opinion, exposing such behavior above uDAPL is incorrect and is part 
> of why uDAPL has seen limited adoption -- every single uDAPL 
> implementation behaves in different ways, making it extremely difficult 
> to write an application to work on any uDAPL implementation.  Sorry if 
> this sounds harsh, but this comes from many hours of banging my head on 
> the wall due to working around these sorts of problems :)
> 

I understand your frustration.  I think the MPA protocol is deficient in
this respect and should have required the necessary "first FPDU" to be
sent under the covers by the RNICs. A RTR packet if you will.  To
resolve this issue "properly", in my opinion, would involve changing the
IETF MPA spec and also breaking all the existing iwarp HW.  We can't do
that.

The reason it is hard or impossible to solve this in the DAPL layer is
that any rdma operation on the QP affects the state of that QP and the
associate CQs.  In addition, if you use an RDMA send to enforce this you
impact the other side by consuming a RECV buffer. So its hard if not
impossible to do this under the covers without affecting the
application's resources.

Also, the DAPL specification had a goal to not impose any additional
protocol on the wire.  If you add this under the covers, then you add
such a "protocol" and break interoperability between a connection
accessed via DAPL on one end and some other API on the other end.

> > 
> > Here is a possible solution: 
> > 
> > I assume in OMPI that connections are only initiated when the mpi
> > application does a send operation.   Given that, then udapl btl must
> > ensure that if a given rank accepts a connection, it cannot not send
> > anything until the rank at the other end of the connection sends first.
> > Since the other side initiated the connection, it will have pending data
> > to send...
> > 
> > I haven't looked into how painful this will be to implement.
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> 
> Following on what I wrote above, I think Open MPI is the wrong place to 
> be dealing with this.  There's enough of these hacks as it is; I'm not 
> interested in seeing more get added.
> 

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to come up with a solution that works
with existing iWARP HW and is interoperable. 

Steve.