I/OAT: Call for discussion

I/OAT: Call for discussion

[Grover, Andrew]

Over the past few months, we (the Intel networking group) have been
working hard, often off-list, to get the I/OAT patches we've posted here
merged into the mainline kernel branch, as well as Red Hat and SuSE.
We've had some success, but not what's really important: getting it into
the mainline kernel releases.

Of course some of this can be blamed on how a corporate culture
approaches the open source community when it thinks it has something
that gives it a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If we acted
like jerks, it's just because we think we have something good here! :) 

But seriously, I know we've had longer turnaround times in releases and
replying to comments than people have liked. All we can say is sorry, we
really have been doing our best. People were kind enough to review our
patches and suggest over 50 improvements, we have fixed the patches
accordingly, and we really do appreciate it.

So OK assume we have a nice pretty patchset. Why should it go in? Since
we have an NDA with Red Hat we've been trying to convince DaveM and Red
Hat of I/OAT's merits off-list, but this kind of change needs a more
public airing of all its pros and cons.

We have posted all the performance data we have gathered so far on the
linux-net wiki: http://linux-net.osdl.org/index.php/I/OAT , and listed
the overall concerns that have been expressed in private. I'm hoping you
will look at the data, re-examine the patches, and then we can talk
about the technical issues here on the list, getting down to the
specifics, so we can hash it out in public and settle on the right path
to take.

Thanks -- Regards -- Andy

Re: I/OAT: Call for discussion

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:39:37 -0700
"Grover, Andrew" <andrew.grover@intel.com> wrote:

> Over the past few months, we (the Intel networking group) have been
> working hard, often off-list, to get the I/OAT patches we've posted here
> merged into the mainline kernel branch, as well as Red Hat and SuSE.
> We've had some success, but not what's really important: getting it into
> the mainline kernel releases.

Vendor kernel support has little or no bearing on eventual inclusion.

> Of course some of this can be blamed on how a corporate culture
> approaches the open source community when it thinks it has something
> that gives it a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If we acted
> like jerks, it's just because we think we have something good here! :) 
> 
> But seriously, I know we've had longer turnaround times in releases and
> replying to comments than people have liked. All we can say is sorry, we
> really have been doing our best. People were kind enough to review our
> patches and suggest over 50 improvements, we have fixed the patches
> accordingly, and we really do appreciate it.
> 
> So OK assume we have a nice pretty patchset. Why should it go in? Since
> we have an NDA with Red Hat we've been trying to convince DaveM and Red
> Hat of I/OAT's merits off-list, but this kind of change needs a more
> public airing of all its pros and cons.

Off list lobbying usually has a negative impact.

> We have posted all the performance data we have gathered so far on the
> linux-net wiki: http://linux-net.osdl.org/index.php/I/OAT , and listed
> the overall concerns that have been expressed in private. I'm hoping you
> will look at the data, re-examine the patches, and then we can talk
> about the technical issues here on the list, getting down to the
> specifics, so we can hash it out in public and settle on the right path
> to take.

The biggest barrier at this point seems to be hardware availability.
People generally don't care unless they use or are going to get that hardware.
Also the big benchmark data, although interesting, is usually only
interesting to vendors.

You probably will have to suffer out of tree for a while until the hardware
becomes more available. When the hardware is more common, then the implementation
details will be sorted out. Also after the 2+ years of getting TSO to work
right, maybe the developers are a little gun shy at this point.

Re: I/OAT: Call for discussion

[John Ronciak]

On 4/19/06, Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org> wrote:
> Off list lobbying usually has a negative impact.
The lobbying was for vendor inclusion and not necessarily for upstream
acceptance.

> The biggest barrier at this point seems to be hardware availability.
> People generally don't care unless they use or are going to get that hardware.
> Also the big benchmark data, although interesting, is usually only
> interesting to vendors.
The hardware is going to generally available in June.  There are also
lots of OEMs, OSVs and hardware vendors that have the system to test
on today.  The early rollout of hardware has been very large.

>
> You probably will have to suffer out of tree for a while until the hardware
> becomes more available. When the hardware is more common, then the implementation
> details will be sorted out. Also after the 2+ years of getting TSO to work
> right, maybe the developers are a little gun shy at this point.
Some OSVs (at least one very large one) is supporting it.

John

Re: I/OAT: Call for discussion

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 10:28:41AM -0700, John Ronciak wrote:
> The hardware is going to generally available in June.  There are also
> lots of OEMs, OSVs and hardware vendors that have the system to test
> on today.  The early rollout of hardware has been very large.

As a start to get people actually interested you should stop talking
like a jerk and kill all these silly three-letter acronyms from your language.

As for larget, I don't have one for sure :)  And I haven't hard from any
kernel developer that he had hardware to play with, but maybe you gave
them a nasty nda to shut them up, which of course doesn't help getting things
merged either.

Re: I/OAT: Call for discussion

[Andi Kleen]

On Wednesday 19 April 2006 18:39, Grover, Andrew wrote:

> We have posted all the performance data we have gathered so far on the
> linux-net wiki: http://linux-net.osdl.org/index.php/I/OAT , and listed
> the overall concerns that have been expressed in private. I'm hoping you
> will look at the data, re-examine the patches, and then we can talk
> about the technical issues here on the list, getting down to the
> specifics, so we can hash it out in public and settle on the right path
> to take.

Maybe it would be best if you just reposted the patches? 

-Andi

Re: I/OAT: Call for discussion

[Andrew Grover]

On 4/19/06, Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 April 2006 18:39, Grover, Andrew wrote:
>
> > We have posted all the performance data we have gathered so far on the
> > linux-net wiki: http://linux-net.osdl.org/index.php/I/OAT , and listed
> > the overall concerns that have been expressed in private. I'm hoping you
> > will look at the data, re-examine the patches, and then we can talk
> > about the technical issues here on the list, getting down to the
> > specifics, so we can hash it out in public and settle on the right path
> > to take.
>
> Maybe it would be best if you just reposted the patches?

OK, I can do that tomorrow. For now I put them on the wiki (see link above)

-- Andy

Re: I/OAT: Call for discussion

[Jack Vogel]

On 4/19/06, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 10:28:41AM -0700, John Ronciak wrote:
> > The hardware is going to generally available in June.  There are also
> > lots of OEMs, OSVs and hardware vendors that have the system to test
> > on today.  The early rollout of hardware has been very large.
>
> As a start to get people actually interested you should stop talking
> like a jerk and kill all these silly three-letter acronyms from your language.


??? For a community absolutely FILLED with everyday use of acronyms
it boggles the mind why you would call someone names for using them.

So if they were 4 letter ones it would make him a savant instead??

Jack

Re: I/OAT: Call for discussion

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

On 4/20/06, Jack Vogel <jfvogel@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/19/06, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 10:28:41AM -0700, John Ronciak wrote:
> > > The hardware is going to generally available in June.  There are also
> > > lots of OEMs, OSVs and hardware vendors that have the system to test
> > > on today.  The early rollout of hardware has been very large.
> >
> > As a start to get people actually interested you should stop talking
> > like a jerk and kill all these silly three-letter acronyms from your language.
>
> ??? For a community absolutely FILLED with everyday use of acronyms
> it boggles the mind why you would call someone names for using them.
>
> So if they were 4 letter ones it would make him a savant instead??

hch is not complaining about TLA usage, he is complaining about _silly_ TLAs
usage, as in to justify new feature acceptance in mainline.

- Arnaldo