[ofw] Expose a vendor defined device in ibbus?

[James Yang]

Hi Fab,

I will start to implement the changes and submit for the review.

Thanks,
James

-----Original Message-----
From: Fab Tillier [mailto:ftillier at windows.microsoft.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 10:13 AM
To: Tzachi Dar; James Yang; ofw at lists.openfabrics.org
Subject: RE: [ofw] Expose a vendor defined device in ibbus?

> It seems to me that the best solution for you is to use a mechanism
> that is close to what the ipoib partition manager are using. This is a
> mechanism that allows one to add more devices with a hard coded name
> of IBA\\IPoIBP. So what you should probably do is to change that
> mechanism to allow it creating devices with different names.
> Using this you will be able to achieve your goal in a generic way.

I think it would be worthwhile at this point to design a solution that works for both James' issue, IPoIB's partition support, as well as IOU/IOC devices (to replace IBAL's IOC PnP logic).  Some of this was already discussed either on the mailing list or at the Sonoma Workshop in the past.

And to be clear, James, the way this would work from a development perspective is that you would implement the change and submit patches for discussion, unless you make other arrangements.

To kick off the discussion, here are my thoughts:

1. static device creation should be generic enough that it could be used for all IO Units/IO Controllers.  A REG_MULTI_SZ registry type, filled with strings representing each child device, would do the trick here.  We should discuss what should be in this string.  As a starting point, let me suggest:
- Hardware IDs
- Compatible IDs
- Name
- Location
- Unique ID of the device -
- Parent ID, which is either NULL if the parent is the HCA, or the Unique ID of a parent device.  This allows building a hierarchy of devices so that IOC to IOU relationships can be represented in the device manager.
- Port GUID
- PKey

For IPoIB this could look something like: "HW_ID:IBA\IPOIB COMP_ID:NULL NAME:"IPoIB Adapter" LOC:AUTO UID:IBA\IPOIB\F8F3010000AD0500FFFF PARENT_ID:NULL PORT_GUID:0005AD000001F3F8 PKEY:FFFF"

Are there other properties that I have missed that are needed?

2. The IOC PnP manager in IBAL is problematic in large fabrics because it creates such a high SA traffic load.  Sean suggested a while back having a configuration tool that scans the fabric for IOU/IOC and allows the user to select the devices which should be reported statically (by writing a bus driver registry key that the bus driver reads when it loads or is triggered via an IOCTL).  This would allow removing the IOC PnP manager form IBAL.

-Fab