Re: [RFCv2 00/15] RFCv2: Consolidated userspace RDMA library repo

["ira.weiny" <ira.weiny-ral2JQCrhuEAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

> 
> Unfortunataely, what you speak of is not really realistic, both for the
> reasons I've cited and a whole litany of other reasons I didn't mention.
> 
> But I don't think Jason jumped in to work on this because of the goal of
> making Red Hat's life easier in packaging up the separate code.  He did
> it for upstream related reasons:
> 
> 1) Put all of the providers and libibverbs in one place so that they can
> be kept in sync.  This allows us to do the exact same thing we do with
> the kernel in user space.  Namely, if someone makes an incompatible
> change in the libibverbs core, we can require that they fix up all
> providers in the same patch series.  This works rather well for the
> kernel, and it would be good to bring that policy to user space too.
> 
> 2) Put all of the kernel interacting libraries in one place.  This makes
> it easier to perform the write->ioctl conversion we've been discussing
> as there would be only one larger package that needs to be updated for
> any given kernel ioctl update.
> 
> 3) Bring librdmacm and libibverbs together so that the occasional
> incompatible update between the two is not an issue any more.
> 
> 4) Create an easier to build/install package for developers to use.
> 
> Those are the issues we should be discussing the relative merits of in
> order to determine whether this work should be adopted.
> 

I see one more benefit here.  This should give us an opportunity to consolidate
and clarify the interface to the _users_ of these libraries.  For example it
has always bothered me is there are about 3 places that a PathRecord struct was
defined.  To be clear I think PathRecords should be hidden from the user but in
general keeping a clean interface to the user between librdmacm, libibverbs,
and to a lesser extent (or maybe not at all) libibumad would be very nice for
the end user.

Ira

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