[ofa-general] RE: [ofw] skipping QP states during transitions

[Leonid Keller]

Mellanox HCA doesn't support multiple commands to the same QP.
Driver prevents this case with a mutex, taken in the beginning of
modify-qp and query_qp.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ofw-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org 
> [mailto:ofw-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org] On Behalf Of Fab Tillier
> Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 9:04 PM
> To: Sean Hefty; Tzachi Dar; general at lists.openfabrics.org; 
> ofw at lists.openfabrics.org
> Subject: RE: [ofw] skipping QP states during transitions
> 
> >> Look at the IB spec on section 10.3
> >
> > I was just exploring whether any hardware, separate from 
> the existing 
> > software stacks, supported 'skipping' QP states -- assuming 
> necessary 
> > values for the other states were also given.  In theory, hardware 
> > could walk through the states internally.  The motivation is to 
> > decrease the time to connect QPs by reducing the number of commands 
> > that need to be issued to the hardware.
> 
> Assuming the hardware processes commands in the order they're 
> submitted (at least per serializes commands by resource), the 
> HCA driver should be able to queue up the various modify 
> commands so that they are executed by the HCA driver 
> back-to-back.  A failure anywhere in this process should 
> cause all subsequent commands to fail due to the QP being in 
> the wrong state.
> 
> A single IOCTL could generate multiple back-to-back 
> asynchronous QP modify requests.
> 
> This would eliminate the command completion processing time 
> from the QP modify.
> 
> However, you need to have async QP modify support in the HCA 
> driver, and ideally the HW needs to be able to process 
> multiple commands issued against a single QP properly 
> (Tzachi, is this something the Mellanox HCAs support?)  Note 
> that if the HW driver cannot process multiple commands 
> outstanding for a single resource, the driver could queue up 
> the commands and issue the next from the DPC as soon as the 
> first is completed.  In the current model, the DPC has to 
> wake up the blocked thread which does whatever post 
> processing of the command and unwinds to the caller, who then 
> has to make the next blocking QP modify call.
> 
> -Fab
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