I was selected as General Area Review Team reviewer for this specification
(for background on Gen-ART, please see
http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/gen-art-FAQ.html).
Summary: This document is on the right track for publication as a Proposed
Standard. I do have some comments, but overall the document is in good
shape.
Specific review comments:
There are a couple of places in the document that refer to 2^31-octet link
MTUs for connected-mode Infiniband), and then talk about "reasonably large
MTUs" without qualification. I would be more comfortable if the text talked
about "reasonably large MTUs, up to the 64-kilobyte maximum IP length", just
to manage expectations more clearly.
The document does attempt to explain "why use connected mode if datagram
mode is most appropriate for IP?". The introduction names two advantages of
connected mode (larger MTUs and enhanced reliability), but it would be nice
to be a bit clearer ("These are the advantages of Infiniband connected mode
over datagram mode:") - I'm not even sure from the text if these are the
only advantages or not.
The document does talk about retransmission timer interaction with TCP RTO
(in Section 7.1), and this is good, but the text suggests "the RC timers as
well as the maximum message size supported at the IPoIB-RC connection must
be set judiciously". This is actually harder than it looks, because TCP RTO
is adaptive (with a minumum value of one second), so it would be nice to
offer a little more guidance on selecting RC timer values.
In Section 8.0, Security Considerations, "A node may be returned a false set
of flags by an imposter" is just a little too out-of-context for me to
parse. Naming the operation being attacked and/or the message containing the
false set of flags would help.
Editorial comments noticed during Gen-ART review:
In the second sentence of the Introduction, "The document [IPoIB_ARCH]
provides" is awkward - the style used in the first sentence, "The InfiniBand
specification [IB_ARCH] can be found" is clearer to me (this is a nit).
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