On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 10:07 -0800, Sean Hefty wrote:
In all fairness, the kernel portion of all of this, and the process of
getting things into Linus' kernel, has *always* been a case of staging
things in Roland's tree and then merging upstream. So, at least for the
kernel, that's mostly true as OFED is pretty close to Roland's tree
generally speaking. As for the user space packages though, you guys
*are* the upstream. There's no one to merge upstream to and very little
oversight by anyone. So, it's entirely up to all of you just how much
your package seems to be a feature of the day change-athon versus a
solid, stable program.
I don't believe that this is the model actually in use. OFED has accepted
kernel features that have not been submitted for upstream inclusion, or, in
some
cases, that were, but were rejected. (For examples, see local SA, SA event
subscription, XRC, SDP, and some of the previous incarnations of IPoIB CM.)
There are thousands of lines of code difference between OFED and the kernel
upon
which it's based. (To be clear, I'm not objecting to any changes, just the
sheer volume.)
The OFED releases of the userspace libraries are not identical to those
provided
by the maintainers. (See libibverbs.) Whose version of libibverbs does
RedHat
plan on using? How do you manage the differences between OFED and Roland's
libibverbs libraries?
And I'm really not trying to come across harsh here, but if the distros are
willing to pull the OFED code, why should OFA bother trying to merge anything
upstream?
I pull *some* OFED code. I don't pull it all. There are things in OFED
I won't accept until they've gone upstream. Hence, RDS is not in our
offering. We made the mistake of taking SDP long ago and we'll carry
that forward, but we generally look for things to be upstream before
pulling them from OFED at this point (or at least have been submitted
upstream and is being worked towards acceptance).
In terms of user space, given a choice between a released tarball or the
custom OFED tarball, I choose the released tarball. So, I currently
have Roland's libibverbs, libmthca, and libmlx4.
--
Doug Ledford [EMAIL PROTECTED]
GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
http://people.redhat.com/dledford
Infiniband specific RPMs available at
http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband
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