[ofa-general] Re: How to tell what OFED rev a distro derived IB modules?

[Vu Pham]

Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote:
> Chris Worley, on 04/27/2009 07:54 PM wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:03 AM, Bart Van Assche
>> <bart.vanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Jack Morgenstein
>>> <jackm at dev.mellanox.co.il> wrote:
>>>> The OFED distributions may contain features that the mainstream 
>>>> kernels and libraries do not support.
>>>> These features frequently require changes in the Infiniband kernel 
>>>> modules.  Such changes are in the form
>>>> of kernel patches which are applied to the base mainstream kernel 
>>>> on which the OFED release is based.
>>>> A lag between the mainstream kernel and the OFED kernel is 
>>>> unavoidable, since the new features are first
>>>> released in the OFED distributions -- and later, gradually (and 
>>>> hopefully), these features make there way
>>>> into the upstream kernel.
>>> I don't doubt that there is a good reason why new features go in the
>>> OFED distribution first and later in the mainstream Linux kernel.
>>
>> My opinion is: IB is still just too bleeding edge, even for the
>> vanilla Linux kernel.
>>
>> Maybe "Upstream First" is the measure of IB achieving stability.
>>
>> SRP (specifically the SCST target code) is my first case in using IB
>> where I've not been able to start with the latest OFED (or IBGD)
>> stable release, as OFED is unsupported by the SRP target code, and had
>> to start with a distro's IB version to get a working SRP target (of
>> which Ubuntu 8.10 provided the only stable SRP target distro for my
>> configuration).
>
> I think, to find out who's guilty, OFED or SRP target driver, you 
> should simply try the latest SCST/SRP driver from the SCST SVN trunk 
> with the known working OFED. Only make sure you don't have again mixed 
> up older and new SCST headers.
>
Here is the simple rule of thumb:
1. If you want to use latest/greatest top of trunk SCST SVN, kernel 
2.6.28, 29... then you have to use the IB driver/modules in that kernel 
tree. You also have to use the ib_srpt driver in SCST SVN tree

2. If you want to run IB driver, ib_srpt driver and SCST on distribution 
default kernel (RHEL 5,0/1/2 and its family ie. fedora, centos..., sles 
10 sp1/sp2...) then you should use OFED package (with ib_srpt inside the 
package), SCST-1.0.0
In the OFED-1.xxx/docs directory, there is a readme on how-to ib_srpt