[Ofa_boardplus] OFED releases

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 09:44:11PM +0000, Atchley, Scott wrote:

> Again, I am not arguing for a change in anyone’s workflow from
> pushing upstream first. But while upstream debates implementation
> and while the eventual design works its way to the distro backports,
> what should users do with hardware on their floor?

They need to use the fork of the software that vendor provides. There
is no other answer. Only the vendor is going to be willing to support
and develop that forked code.

Your #2 problem is the real intractable issue.

The upstream neutral collaborative process is how we have been
successful in getting the vendors to work together, at all. That has
become an industry wide defacto agreed upon way to work on a shared
code base.

There is no way, politically, to just short circuit that process and
keep the vendors engaged.

It isn't reasonable to ask the vendors to union their forks of the
RDMA stack outside of the upstream process - there are overlaps and
disagreements, this would create a different layer of arguing. As a
group, the vendors have no incentive to do that.

The only avenue left is a technical solution - someone has to fund the
work to actually go and create a fork that matches what the sites
need, pulling from the vendor forks, and do this faster than the
upstream process would get it done.

Frankly, this is what all the big cloud operators do internally - they
fund a kernel and infrastructure development team to mangle the
software into the shape they want, and upstream things to minimize
their maintenance cost.

Jason