Eli, The biggest driver is usually the drivers. Newer Mellanox hardware not yet supported, or supported well, by kernel IB. Way back in the days of old there were some interoperability issues where everything (clients and servers) needed to be the same drivers and libraries but much of that was cleaned up. There could be situations where OFED is needed on the server side to support something under the Lustre layer like OST or MDT block devices via iSER, SRP, NVMeF, etc.
There may be other reasons but those are off the top of my head. --Jeff On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 4:55 PM, E.S. Rosenberg <esr+lus...@mail.hebrew.edu> wrote: > Hi all, > > How 'needed' is OFED for Lustre? In the LUG talks it is mentioned every > once in a while and that got me thinking a bit. > > What things are gained by installing OFED? Performance? Accurate traffic > reports? > > Currently I am using a lustre system without OFED but our IB hardware is > from the FDR generation so not bleeding edge and probably doesn't need OFED > because of that.... > > Thanks, > Eli > > Tech specs: > Servers: CentOS 6.8 + Lustre 2.8 (kernel from Lustre RPMs) > Clients: Debian + kernel 4.2 + Lustre 2.8 > IB: ConnectX-3 FDR > > _______________________________________________ > lustre-discuss mailing list > lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org > http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org > > -- ------------------------------ Jeff Johnson Co-Founder Aeon Computing jeff.john...@aeoncomputing.com www.aeoncomputing.com t: 858-412-3810 x1001 f: 858-412-3845 m: 619-204-9061 4170 Morena Boulevard, Suite D - San Diego, CA 92117 High-Performance Computing / Lustre Filesystems / Scale-out Storage
_______________________________________________ lustre-discuss mailing list lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org