[gentoo-dev] Re: Infiniband/OmniPath/iWARP and other RDMA related staff

[Holger Hoffstätte]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2016 10:07:07 +0300, Alexey Shvetsov wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> I'm going to revive RDMA fabric related things in gentoo. And since its not

Yay!

> only about infiniband staff but about more generic fabric types there is and
> idea to rename category sys-infiniband to more generic name. Suggestions are
>
> sys-rdma
> sys-fabric
>
> What will be inside? It will be RDMA related stuff like OFED, fabric userspace
> drivers (verbs, psm, psm2, libfabric and others), plugins for specific devices,
> tools to flash RDMA cards and other related staff.

This makes me happy. I've been playing with a standalone libfabric in my
overlay via the sockets/UDP providers, and had nothing but problems when I
tried to add USE flags for the various OFED bits (psm2 etc.)

An up-to-date libfabric that pulls in ofed only when needed would finally enable
people without the otherwise necessary fabric HW to write against the much more
usable & sane (when compared to raw IB verbs) libfabric APIs.

As far as the name is concerned IMHO fabric sounds less RDMA-specific;
I think the OFI WG now also prefers implementation-neutral terms.

cheers,
Holger