> OFED is one distribution of the OpenFabrics software. It can be > bundled up and packaged differently, too. I suspect that Debian does > not include OFED directly, because OFED is pretty heavily dependent > upon RPM. So the OpenFabrics kernel bits must be there somewhere > (libibverbs would be useless, otherwise); it would be nice to > understand how they are activated: either manually or automatically.
"OpenFabrics kernel bits" doesn't really make sense. Debian just ships a Linux kernel, which has InfiniBand/RDMA drivers. Debian doesn't load the ib_uverbs module by default, nor should it, since the vast majority of users don't have RDMA hardware. So libibverbs and Open MPI should act sanely when no kernel drivers are loaded, /sys/class/infinibad_verbs doesn't exist, etc. There is already a Debian bug open about this for libibverbs: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=418014 I've been meaning to work on this but sadly I have not been able to put much time into it. - R.
