Re: When IBoE will be merged to upstream?

Jason Gunthorpe
2010-06-25T15:57:55Z

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 11:04:28AM +0300, Liran Liss wrote:

> VLANs are part of L2 in Ethernet -- when you resolve a destination
> L3 address to an L2 address, you get the outgoing interface, which
> also determines the VLAN. I think this approach has an advantage
> over an RDMA device per VLAN in that you keep the standard OS VLAN
> management (vconfig).

Except that in RoCE all L3 addresses are link local GIDs, which must
be scoped to an interface and cannot be resolved by routing to a
specific interface. vconfig creates child ethernet devices, I think
you have no choice but to do the same for RDMA. The GID, when it is
resolved, must be scoped to the RDMA device it is going to be bound
to, which in turn must be bound to a VLAN.

(BTW, Sean, did AF_IB's sockaddr include a scoping field, and did you
figure out some way to make that work?)

> I wouldn't judge the RoCE spec so quickly --- it guarantees that
> rdma application binaries could run on any network. What do you
> gain by exposing Eth-specific L2 params in the address handle?

Well, 1) invariably that is how the hardware must work, and verbs is
about exposing that interface to userspace 2) You don't suddenly make
AH setup require network traffic, and potentitally large time
delays 3) it keeps the whole RoCE architecture far more consistent
with IB.

You can pose the same question for IB, why doesn't AH resolution
resolve the GID? There are lots of good answers :)

Also bear in mind that APM is entirely possible over RoCE and doing
that will require a finer touch for managing the data in the AH's.

What do you get by doing all this extra work? I say nothing at
all. Users won't even be able to tell the difference as long as they
use rdmacm to setup the connections.

Jason