Rayson,

Is VFIO stabilized and in the kernel yet? I saw Jeff's demo at SC11 and he said 
that VFIO was not yet ready for primetime. If he gave an estimated timeframe, I 
do not remember.

Also, keep in mind, that it allows direct access to Ethernet frames. If you 
want any sort of reliability (timeout and retransmission) and I am pretty sure 
PVFS2 expects it, the BMI VFIO driver will need to implement it. I do not think 
that Jeff implemented any for his demo Open-MPI BTL.

Like you, I think it is an interesting idea. It is an alternative approach to 
bypassing the TCP/IP compared to Open-MX which still sends through the kernel 
albeit directly to the Ethernet driver.

Scott

On Jan 13, 2012, at 4:22 PM, Rayson Ho wrote:

> Hi Walter,
> 
> Thanks for looking into it.
> 
> My knowledge on PVFS is limited (I've read about it, and I enjoyed
> your RCE cast). I am going to try PVFS for a new project, but I know
> nothing about VFIO & PVFS internals!
> 
> BTW, I looked into the code, and the BMI for IB or TCP is less than
> 5000 lines of code (I did "cat *.c | wc"  - I know the actual number
> of lines of code is way less). Does it make sense to start a Google
> Summer of Code project for it??
> 
> Rayson
> 
> =================================
> Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine
> http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Scalable Grid Engine Support Program
> http://www.scalablelogic.com/
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Walter Ligon <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm not aware of anyone doing that, but it sure sounds like something we
>> would want to do!  I'm putting it on the list.  If someone wants to do it,
>> by all means get in touch.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Walt
>> 
>> 
>> On 1/12/12 2:43 PM, Rayson Ho wrote:
>>> 
>>> We have some discussions on another HPC clustering mailing list on
>>> InfiniBand vs 10GbE, and with VFIO even traditional Ethernet NICs can
>>> perform OS-bypass. I was wondering if any PVFS2 developers are working
>>> on adding VFIO support?
>>> 
>>> http://blogs.cisco.com/performance/open-mpi-over-linux-vfio/
>>> http://lwn.net/Articles/474088/
>>> 
>>> Thanks!
>>> 
>>> Rayson
>>> 
>>> =================================
>>> Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine
>>> http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/
>>> 
>>> Scalable Grid Engine Support Program
>>> http://www.scalablelogic.com/
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Pvfs2-developers mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://www.beowulf-underground.org/mailman/listinfo/pvfs2-developers
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Rayson
> 
> ==================================================
> Open Grid Scheduler - The Official Open Source Grid Engine
> http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/
> 
> _______________________________________________
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