On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Roland Dreier <rdreier@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > - 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. What I had in mind was not to start searching for code shared between the ipoib and ibmveth kernel modules, but to replace the virtual Ethernet layer by IPoIB on top of a new RDMA driver. I'm not sure however this approach would work better than the currently implemented approach in ibmveth. > 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. Agreed. But several people are currently looking at how to improve the performance of I/O performed inside a virtual machine without being familiar with the VIA architecture or the RDMA API. This is a pity because the Virtual Interface Architecture was designed to allow high-throughput low-latency I/O, and has some features that are not present in any other mainstream I/O architecture I know of (e.g. the ability to perform I/O from userspace without having to invoke any system call in the performance-critical path). Bart. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
