On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 09:08:42AM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote: >Doug is a busy person and there is a limit on how fast he can handle it. >He is already buried under his internal and external responsibilities. >Placing him responsible for vendors code will add extra step, extra complexity to the chain and will hurt kernel/libibverbs flows. I agree with Leon on this. Having all of the vendor user libraries bundled in with the core verbs code is just a bad idea. Most of the H/W vendors I have talked with would prefer that vendor libraries be distributed separately from the core libibverbs code. The biggest reason for this is to allow vendors to provide incremental updates, bug fixes, etc. to their customers without having to distribute/update a version of the entire package and/or wait for some third party maintainer to get around to releasing a new package. If everything is bundled together, it makes providing incremental updates very problematic. For example, say vendor A needs to distribute a simple bug fix in their code to a customer so they make a copy of the bundled package, add their fix and give it to a customer. Seems simple, right ? But then vendor B has a similar situation and distributes a package with only a fix to their library, but when the customer Installs it, it overwrites the package provided by vendor A and removes their bug fix. This kind of thing will end up as a huge disaster for customers and vendors that are trying to support their customers. So I see some options to avoid this mess. 1.) Keep the vendor user library packages separate from the core libibverbs code, as it is today. 2.) Allow a vendor the ability to distribute their library package separately from the bundled package. 3.) Allow the ability for a vendor to distribute an update package that just contains their library code to replace the version of that code that is in the bundled package. I think that OFI, for example, has something like this to avoid this kind of mess. My 2 cents, Woody -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rdma" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
