[ofiwg] getting hardware details from libfabric

[Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)]

On May 29, 2018, at 1:01 PM, Hefty, Sean <sean.hefty at intel.com> wrote:
> 
>> Should we indicate the transport layer here?  (Ethernet, IB,
>> Omnipath, GNI, ...etc.)
> 
> I don't even know what transport protocol means anymore, and I'm not entirely joking.  RoCE is IB transport over UDP, which is also a transport, over which we could layer the utility provider ofi_rxm, so the transport is... ?

I don't think protocols like RoCEv2 vs. UDP vs. TCP vs. ... are useful, because many of the devices that libfabric supports can speak lots of protocols.  And some 

When I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_layer#Link_layer_protocols, I see ARP, NDP, OSPF, PPP, ...etc.

Given that "protocol" and "transport" may be overloaded terms, should we use a field name like "network_type"?  That lets us identify Ethernet, IB, Omnipath, GNI, ... etc.  I think that's what we're trying to identify here, right?

-- 
Jeff Squyres
jsquyres at cisco.com