[ofa-general] OFED Jan 28 meeting summary on RC3 readiness

[Kossey, Robert]

I would prefer not to see OFED 1.3 delayed for this.  There will always be another bug, so you have to close the release and ship at some point.  In the case of these particular bugs, IIRC, the first involved an older HCA that may not be widely used.  The other UDP performance bugs do not have any ready fixes that I'm aware of.

A more general question I would like to ask the group is how many people use OFED from the RH or SUSE distros as is, as compared with using OFED releases from other sources like the IB vendors, or building their own from openfabrics.org?  We use RH distros, but to this point, the OFED support provided in RH distros has lagged behind the latest releases available from openfabrics.org.  This is not to fault Red Hat, but OFED is still changing too rapidly, with minor point releases and bug fixes, for a distro to keep up.  I think many of us hope that someday that will not be the case, but appears to be true for the foreseeable future.  Right now, our mode of operation is to remove whatever IB support comes in the distro and replace it, so it does not help us to delay  OFED 1.3 to get a particular bug fix in a distro.

Bob

> -----Original Message-----
> ...
> Doug Ledford wrote:
> >
> > Hmmm...I'd like to put my $.02 in here.  I don't have any
> visibility
> > into what drives the OFED schedule, so I have no clue as to
> why people
> > don't want to slip the schedule for this change.  I'm sure you guys
> > have your reasons.  However, I also happen to be a consumer of this
> > code, and I know for a fact that no one has gotten my input on this
> > issue.  So, the deal is that I'm currently integrating OFED
> 1.3 into
> > what will be RHEL5.2.  The RHEL5.2 freeze date has already
> passed, but
> > in order to keep what finally goes out from being too
> stale, I'm being
> > allowed to submit the OFED-1.3-rc1 code prior to freeze, and then
> > update to
> > OFED-1.3 final during our beta test process.  What this
> means, is that
> > anything you punt from 1.3 to 1.3.1, you are also punting out of
> > RHEL5.2 and RHEL4.7.  So, that being said, there's a whole trickle
> > down effect with various groups that would really like to
> be able to
> > use 5.2 out of the box that may prefer a slip in 1.3 so
> that this can
> > be part of it instead of punting to 1.3.1.  I'm not saying
> this will
> > change your mind, but I'm sure it wasn't part of the
> decision process
> > before, so I'm bringing it up.
> >
> Thanks for the input (BTW you are welcome to join our weekly
> meetings and give us feedback online) I think it is important
> to make sure RH new versions will include best OFED release
>
> This my suggestion is:
>
>     * Delay 1.3 release in a week
>     * Do RC4 next week - Feb 6
>     * Add RC5 on Feb 18 - this will be the GOLD version
>     * GA release on Feb 25
>
>
> All - please reply if this is acceptable
> >
> >
> > 760     major   eli at mellanox.co.il      UDP performance on
> Rx is lower
> > than Tx                          - for 1.3.1
> > 761     major   eli at mellanox.co.il      Poor and jittery UDP
> > performance at small messages              - for 1.3.1
> >
> >
> > Ditto for requesting these two be in 1.3.  We've already
> had customers
> > bring up the UDP performance issue in our previous releases.
> >
> >
> We will push some fixes of these to RC4 if the above plan is accepted
>
> Tziporet