[ofa-general] OFED Jan 5, 2009 meeting minutes on OFED plans

[Tziporet Koren]

OFED Jan 5, 2009 meeting minutes on future plans
=====================================

Meeting minutes on the web:

http://www.openfabrics.org/txt/documentation/linux/EWG_meeting_minutes

Meeting Summary:
==============
1. OFED 1.4.1 release: We will look into it on middle of February
2. OFED 1.5: 
    - Release target date is July 09
    - Kernel base will be 2.6.29
    - Features list - not closed yet

Details:
======
1. Conclusions from OFED 1.4 release:
We got several comments from Doug (Redhat):
- ammaso driver is not compiling - we should remove it from the kernel
sources since its not compile
- IBM ehca driver - does not compile on RHEL4
- Improvements for the build system - grep for undefined functions and
report this since they will fail when trying to load the module

Other conclusions:
- Real feature freeze is only after we are on the right kernel base
- We usually have at least 6 RCs - need to plan for this on the schedule

2. Do we wish to have OFED 1.4. 1:
Pros:
We can add the following features:
- RDS iWARP - Steve Wise
- NFS/RDMA backports - Steve Wise
- Open MPI 1.3 - Jeff S.
- Supporting new OSes: RHEL 5.3, SLES 11
- Fixes of fatal bugs - if found

Cons:
- Having 1.4.1 release will delay 1.5 schedule for one month or more. 
- A large QA effort.

Decision: 
Since no fatal bugs were reported so far, we decide to revisit this in
middle of Feb.
Meanwhile Steve can work on RDS iWARP support and NFS/RDMA backports on
the 1.4.1 branch.
People that wish to work with Open MPI 1.3 can download it from its
site.

3. OFED 1.5: Schedule and features.
Schedule:
Release is planned for July. (assuming no 1.4.1 release)

Feature Freeze:	4/20/09
Alpha Release:	4/20/09
Beta Release:	5/20/09
RC1: 		5/05/09
RC2:		5/19/09
RC3:		6/02/09
RC4:		6/16/09
RC5:		6/30/09
RC6:		7/14/09
Release: 	7/28/09

Features:
* Kernel.org: 2.6.28 and 2.6.29
* Multiple Event Queues to support Multi-core CPUs
* NFS/RDMA - GA 
* RDS support for iWARP
* OpenMPI 1.3
* Add support/backports for RedHat EL 5.3 and EL 4.8, SLES 11
* Support for Mellanox vNIC (EoIB) and FCoIB with BridgeX device
* SDP - performance improvements

* Mellanox suggested to add IB over Eth - this is similar to iWARP but
more like IB (e.g. including UD), and can work over ConnectX.  
A concern was raised by Intel (Dave Sommers) since it is not a standard
transport.
Decision: This request will be raised in the MWG, and they should decide
if OFA can support it.

More discussions on 1.5 features will be done in next meeting.

Tziporet