[Ofa_boardplus] OFED releases

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 08:33:29PM +0000, Woodruff, Robert J wrote:
> Jason wrote,
> >Bear in mind that, except in some limited cases, OFA members are already solving these problems, using the industry accepted 'upstream first' >collaborative process.
> 
> >1) The upstream kernel is immediately available for pre-release
>   > testing of new features
> >2) The single kernel provides vendor co-existence and the
> >   collaborative testing encourages interoperability.
> 
> I have to disagree with this somewhat. Getting your code upstream does allow it to be in the same kernel as someone else's driver,
> but it does not at all guarantee interoperability. The reason is
> that most vendors only develop and test their code with their H/W
> and

All vendors test their H/W with the upstream kernel at some point and
will detect co-existance bugs.

Various 3rd parties are doing direct cross-vendor interop against
mainline as well.

OFED is the thing that gets less testing these days as the vendors
test either upstream or their vOFED, and the distros ignore it
completely.

> > 1) Users need a mechanism to use features/capabilities that have not landed in upstream yet.
> 
> Unfortunately the sad fact is that it takes at least 6-12 months to
> get code into a production Linux distro like RHEL and SLES even
> after it is accepted upstream.

Maybe so, but I think it is important to be clear what the concern is
from Scott.

'make it go faster' is a pretty specific want and quite different from
'the upstream collaborative process does not produce what is needed'.

Jason