[ofw] Porting OFA stack to WDK

[Fab Tillier]

-----Original Message-----
From: ofw-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org [mailto:ofw-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org] On Behalf Of Sean Hefty
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:09 AM
To: Fab Tillier; 'Leonid Keller'; ofw at lists.openfabrics.org
Cc: Alex Naslednikov
Subject: RE: [ofw] Porting OFA stack to WDK
>
>Is keeping the userspace interfaces the same, but changing the kernel interfaces
>to remove __ptr64 a usable solution?

The ib_al.h and ib_types.h files which contain structures and function declarations with __ptr64 are shared between user and kernel mode.  Keeping user-mode interfaces unchanged while changing the kernel mode interface would require branching these.  However, this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, as there are things in those headers that are kernel-only and this would be an opportunity to clean some of that up.

There's also a lot of shared code between user and kernel mode, so changing the APIs would require branching the implementation of the APIs too.

I guess it comes down to either changing the interfaces and requiring apps to recompile, or branching user- from kernel-mode IBAL so that they can evolve independently.  The easiest is to require a recompile, though determining the impact of this is likely going to be hard.  Longer term, branching might provide welcome flexibility in development.

-Fab