[ewg] Re: [ofa-general] OFED Jan 28 meeting summary onRC3readiness

[Sean Hefty]

>In all fairness, the kernel portion of all of this, and the process of
>getting things into Linus' kernel, has *always* been a case of staging
>things in Roland's tree and then merging upstream.  So, at least for the
>kernel, that's mostly true as OFED is pretty close to Roland's tree
>generally speaking.  As for the user space packages though, you guys
>*are* the upstream.  There's no one to merge upstream to and very little
>oversight by anyone.  So, it's entirely up to all of you just how much
>your package seems to be a feature of the day change-athon versus a
>solid, stable program.

I don't believe that this is the model actually in use.  OFED has accepted
kernel features that have not been submitted for upstream inclusion, or, in some
cases, that were, but were rejected.  (For examples, see local SA, SA event
subscription, XRC, SDP, and some of the previous incarnations of IPoIB CM.)
There are thousands of lines of code difference between OFED and the kernel upon
which it's based.  (To be clear, I'm not objecting to any changes, just the
sheer volume.)

The OFED releases of the userspace libraries are not identical to those provided
by the maintainers.  (See libibverbs.)  Whose version of libibverbs does RedHat
plan on using?  How do you manage the differences between OFED and Roland's
libibverbs libraries?

And I'm really not trying to come across harsh here, but if the distros are
willing to pull the OFED code, why should OFA bother trying to merge anything
upstream? 

- Sean