Re: [PATCH] SCSI driver for VMware's virtual HBA.

Roland Dreier
2009-09-01T16:12:43Z

> - Reuse the existing SRP initiator (ib_srp). Currently there are two
> SRP initiators present in the Linux kernel -- one that uses the RDMA
> verbs API (ib_srp) and one that only works with IBM's i/pSeries
> hypervisor (ibmvscsi).

This would be sane, although the difference in management APIs etc made
this seem like quite a bit of work when I looked at it (hence the
existence of both ibmvscsi and ib_srp).

> - Reuse the ib_ipoib kernel module to provide an IP stack on top of
> the new RDMA driver instead of having to maintain a separate network
> driver for this hardware (ibmveth).

I don't think this really makes sense, because IPoIB is not really
handling ethernet (it is a different L2 ethernet encapsulation), and I
think the commonality with ibmveth is going to be minimal.

I'm not really sure we should be trying to force drivers to share just
because they are paravirtualized -- if there is real commonality, then
sure put it in common code, but different hypervisors are probably as
different as different hardware.

- R.