I'm very happy to be able to post an initial version of InfiniBand patches for review. Although this code should be far closer to kernel coding standards than previous open source InfiniBand drivers, this initial posting should be treated as a request for comments and not a request for inclusion; our ultimate goal is to have these drivers included in the mainline kernel, but we expect that fixes and improvements will need to be made before the code is completely acceptable.
These patches add a minimal but complete level of InfiniBand support, including an IB midlayer, a low-level driver for Mellanox HCAs, an IP-over-InfiniBand driver, and a mechanism for MADs (management datagrams) to be passed to and from userspace. This means that these patches are all that is required for the kernel to bring up and use an IP-over-InfiniBand link. (The OpenSM subnet manager has not been ported to this kernel API yet, although this work is underway. This means that at the moment, a kernel with these patches cannot be used to bring up a fabric; however, the kernel side is complete) The code has not been through extreme stress testing yet, but it has been used successfully on i386, x86_64, ppc64, ia64 and sparc64 systems, including mixed 32/64 systems. Feedback on both details of the code as well as the high-level organization of the code will be very much appreciated. For example, the current set of patches puts include files in driver/infiniband/include; would it be preferred to put include files in include/linux/infiniband/, directly in include/linux, or perhaps in include/infiniband? We would also like to explore the best avenue for having these patches merged. It may be desirable for the patches to spend some time in -mm before moving into Linus's kernel; on the other hand, the patches make only very minimal and safe changes outside of drivers/infiniband, so it is quite reasonable to merge them directly into the mainline kernel. Although 2.6.10 is now closed, 2.6.11 will probably be open by the time the review process is complete. We look forward to the community's comments and criticisms! Thanks, Roland Dreier OpenIB Alliance www.openib.org _______________________________________________ openib-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://openib.org/mailman/listinfo/openib-general To unsubscribe, please visit http://openib.org/mailman/listinfo/openib-general
