[Openib-windows] File transfer performance options

[Paul Baxter]

> Tzachi Dar kindly responded with:
In the beginning of this mail thread you have described a problem of
passing files from a Linux server to windows server. You have described
many experiments that you did and the fact that the performance that you
received was not as good as expected.

In reply I have advised you to consider using SDP for this file
transfers. if to summarize your answer in one sentence you said that SDP
is still not ready.
<

While that is true, I've been happy with SDP performance on Linux, but for 
this particular situation wanted to export the data by file/directory 
metaphor rather than by explicit application message transfer. ie let a 
Linux 'driver' support the transfer driven from a Windows app.

Many thanks for doing the experiment.

Was this between a Linux SDP instance and a windows SDP instance?

We'd certainly consider SDP (or verbs ) if we end up having to write an 
explicit message passing application for the Linux side of our application, 
but at present we were trying to write a windows app that directly looked at 
a network mounted disk. An application was NOT required to run on the Linux 
side to 'serve' data.

SRP might be the right answer long term but its still not clear to me if SRP 
is designed to work cross-platform across possibly different IB stacks. Are 
SRP implementations expected to be cross-compatible?

I ask because Mellanox SRP on Windows talks of only being supported with 
particular SRP targets but with a Linux openIB SRP target not yet supported.

Thanks again for your effort.

Paul Baxter