[ofa-general] Re: complib and cl_nodenamemap

[Sasha Khapyorsky]

Hi Sean,

On 11:13 Tue 03 Mar     , Sean Hefty wrote:
> 
> I'd like to see about doing 'something' with nodenamemap.  Currently, it's part
> of complib, but the interfaces and operation are not similar to other complib
> type abstractions.

Yes, it was added later. And main reason for placing it into complib was
to share this code between OpenSM and infiniband-diags.

> From what I can tell, nodenamemap performs two abstractions.  At a lower level,
> it implements functionality similar to cl_map.  The main difference is that
> cl_map requires the user to allocate space for the object being inserted into
> the map.  If we add a new call to complib, we can provide an abstraction of the
> functionality that nodenamemap requires:
> 
> cl_map_insert_copy(cl_map_t *p_map, uint64_t key,
> 			void *p_object, size_t object_size);
> 
> There would be internal changes needed to free the object, plus changes to
> cl_map_remove return values for copied objects.

I don't know how it will be generally useful. Basically we are trying to
not use cl_map in OpenSM but instead much faster cl_qmap primitives.

> At a higher level, nodenamemap parses an application specific file and stores
> the contents of the file into a map.  I'm not sure that this functionality
> really belongs as a part of complib.  But regardless, it makes more sense to me
> to separate the parsing of the file from maintaining the data in a map.
> 
> There's not a need to abstract opening or closing the file.  So the only
> functionality that's needed is parsing a line of input from the file.  Each
> application could link in the necessary code directly, the parsing code could go
> into a new 'ibcommon' library (not really worth it for 1 call),

New library? I'm not really happy. If we need "generic" library what is
wrong with using complib then?

> or the file
> format just needs to be generic enough to work with a wide variety of
> applications (and maybe it already is).

It used mainly in OpenSM for various files parsing with similar format.
Also in infiniband-diags.

> Is it acceptable to change or remove the nodenamemap abstraction from complib,
> and if so, is there a specific direction to take?

Basically yes. But we need to find some acceptable solution first which
will be better than how it is implemented now.

Sasha