Re: [ofa-general] InfiniBand/RDMA merge plans for 2.6.24

From: Steve Wise
Date: Sat Sep 15 2007 - 10:04:16 EST




Roland Dreier wrote:
> I was about to post v2 of my patch to avoid port space collisions with
> the native stack. Can we get that 2.6.24? It is high priority
> IMO. I've tried to solicit review on it, but I think folks are
> reluctant... ;-)

I would like to get this in, but I'm still at least a little
reluctant, since we would be committing to a user interface that seems
a little awkward at best, so I'd like to try and find something
better. Just to summarize my understanding:

- your patch requires the administration to configure an ethX:iwY
alias address to use iwarp. (By the way is there anything other
than "don't do that" that avoids assigning the same address to the
iwarp alias and a non-iwarp interface?)


Nope. Its totally up to the admin to create the ethX:iwY interface -and- to segment his services so host TCP runs on the ethX subnet(s) and the iwarp rdma ones run on ethX:iwY subnet(s). Without changing the core network serices, I don't see any way around this.

- it would be nicer to create the alias automatically, but an alias
without an address doesn't make sense. Creating a whole separate
net device causes problems because the iwarp stuff still needs to
use the main net device to do ARP etc.


I do log a warning if an iwarp application binds to address 0.0.0.0 and there are no ethX:iwY address available.

- so I'm out of better ideas but I still want to push back a little
before we commit to something ugly.


Me 2. :-(

I've been meaning to track down the bnx2 iscsi offload patch to look
and see if this issue is addressed, since the same problem seems to
exist: it seems an iscsi connection and a main stack tcp connection
might share the same 4-tuple unless something is done to avoid that
happening.

Also, I think it behooves us to get some agreement on this approach
with NetEffect and Kanoj (NetXen?) at least, since their iwarp drivers
seem to be imminent.

- R.
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