Hey Hal,

Ira answered most of the important stuff already.  But some extra
details ...

> Second the current alignment breaks libibmad.  So it would be a lot 
> more code to support the miss-alignment and would probably have to be 
> changed anyway.

As far as I can tell, all the code in libibmad currently assumes 32 bit
alignment.  For example, "BITSOFFS(48, 32)" leads to an offset of -16,
which is not good.  I played around with updating the code in libibmad,
but it was a nice chunk of changes for 1 measly field.  We could remove
the problem field until the issue is resolved in IBTA?  Or perhaps we
need to really redo chunks of libibmad to deal with this.

> Also, would you comment on what testing has been done with this ?

I've gotten ibccquery to talk to Mellanox CAs and Switches and output
the current config.  I've got a side tool that can do rudimentary
congestion control settings, so at the minimum I can twiddle some values
and they show up in the output of ibccquery.  I haven't done any testing
w/ real network traffic yet, so there could be lingering bugs.  But this
is just the initial first pass.

Al

On Wed, 2011-09-21 at 08:49 -0700, Ira Weiny wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Sep 2011 07:17:38 -0700
> Hal Rosenstock <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Al,
> > 
> > On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Albert Chu <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > The following patches add a new tool ibccquery to infiniband-diags.  It
> > > supports the querying of various congestion control settings.  Related
> > > updates to libibmad are also included.
> > 
> > Looks good to me :-) Just a few comments below:
> > 
> > Attaching rather than inlining patches makes it harder to comment.
> > 
> > On 0001-Add-support-for-congestion-control-mads.patch, is ib_rpc_cc_t
> > really needed ? Couldn't mkey in existing rpc struct just be
> > reused/overloaded for this (and change comment to indicate mkey or
> > cckey) and then some code could be eliminated ?
> 
> I am not sure I like overloading fields like this.  I will take a look at it
> and see if it "looks" good but in general to keep ABI and clarity of the code
> I preferred the separate struct.
> 
> > 
> > On 0001-Support-ibccquery-congestion-control-query-tool.patch, I'm
> > worried about the following:
> > +           /* XXX: Q3/2010 errata lists first entry offset at 80, but we 
> > assume
> > +            * will be updated to 96 once CurrentTimeStamp field is word 
> > aligned.
> > +            * In addition, assume max 13 log events instead of 16.  Due to
> > +            * errata changes increasing size of CA log event, 16 log 
> > events is
> > +            * no longer possible to fit in max MAD size.
> > +            */
> > 
> > As far as the 13 v. 16 entries, this appears correct to me (MAD size)
> > but I'm concerned about changing the offset from 80 to 96 for better
> > alignment as this is putting the cart before the horse a little as
> > since these changes have not been finalized AFAIK at the IBTA.
> 
> Yes, it is a bit premature.  I have submitted the above alignment as a comment
> to the IBTA but as you say it is not published.  Most importantly the
> miss-alignment breaks the convention of the spec.  So I don't think the IBTA
> will reject the comment.
> 
> Second the current alignment breaks libibmad.  So it would be a lot more code
> to support the miss-alignment and would probably have to be changed anyway.
> 
> > 
> > Also, would you comment on what testing has been done with this ?
> > 
> 
> Right, the real question is what does current hardware do?
> 
> We have been unable to determine if any of the vendors support the errata
> fully or specifically the miss-aligned CurrentTimeStamp.  When I asked the
> vendors I got concrete answers back, so we proceeded with trying to reverse
> engineer it.  Right now the query succeeds, that is all we know.
> 
> Perhaps someone on the list can help us find out?  :-D
> 
> In the meantime we wanted to get comments on the patches.
> 
> Ira
> 
> > -- Hal
> > 
> > > Al
> > >
> > > --
> > > Albert Chu
> > > [email protected]
> > > Computer Scientist
> > > High Performance Systems Division
> > > Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
> > >
> > >
> > --
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rdma" in
> > the body of a message to [email protected]
> > More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> 
> 
-- 
Albert Chu
[email protected]
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory


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