[ofw] what's up with the OFA Windows project?

[Gilad Shainer]

The way to decide on a new code is what fits best the Windows
environment and not what should be done to enable interoperability
between Windows and Linux. As I see it, this is the way to go. 

This is an open source project, and it was so long before you have start
to review the code. Anyone can propose changes and it is the maintainers
who need to approve such changes. Anyone can always take the code, which
is under BSD (not GPL) and do what ever he want with it. The maintainers
responsibility is to make sure the code changes are acceptable and do
not break the existing structure. We as a community need also to have in
mind commercial usage of this code, as we are here for the community and
the end-users.

The NDI support was not officially released from OFW, and any feedback
is welcome. I believe that this issue will be discussed in the next OFW
meeting.

I agree that new changes should also be reflected on the mailing list
before implementations. Therefore I am asking the maintainers to do so
moving forward.

Gilad.


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Hefty [mailto:sean.hefty at intel.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 5:14 PM
To: Gilad Shainer; Jan Bottorff; ofw at lists.openfabrics.org
Subject: RE: [ofw] what's up with the OFA Windows project?

>The added code is in place to add support to Microsoft MPI for Windows 
>HPC Server 2008. Nothing has being silently. All of the maintainers on 
>OFW are aware and have review the code. The purpose of the code is as I

>have wrote above, and we can have a discussion on having this interface

>being used by other applications or not. There is no known plan to 
>re-design the stack or to support multiple stacks. The intend is to 
>make no changes to current ULP or to add extra support in order to make

>sure current applications will continue to work.

Open source does not mean that just the maintainers need to agree.  All
code should be posted and discussed, as the maintainers are not the only
stakeholders.  NDI support could have been added in a more generic
fashion.  The implementation that I've viewed isn't protocol compliant
with the IB spec, nor does it allow interoperating with the Linux
OpenFabrics stack.

In theory, this is an open source project, so anyone can propose and
implement changes to the software stack.

- Sean