From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262549AbUBYA2e (ORCPT ); Tue, 24 Feb 2004 19:28:34 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262550AbUBYA2e (ORCPT ); Tue, 24 Feb 2004 19:28:34 -0500 Received: from mail.zmailer.org ([62.78.96.67]:57766 "EHLO mail.zmailer.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262549AbUBYA20 (ORCPT ); Tue, 24 Feb 2004 19:28:26 -0500 Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:28:19 +0200 From: Matti Aarnio To: Rik van Riel Cc: Greg KH , Christoph Hellwig , "Woodruff, Robert J" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, "Hefty, Sean" , "Coffman, Jerrie L" , "Davis, Arlin R" , marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com, torvalds@osdl.org Subject: Re: PATCH - InfiniBand Access Layer (IBAL) Message-ID: <20040225002819.GP1751@mea-ext.zmailer.org> References: <20040224195745.GA777@kroah.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 05:29:16PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote: > On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Greg KH wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 07:50:18PM +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > > > I don't understand why anyone is wasting time on this. Without available > > > hardware drivers this huge midlayer is completely useless. > > You mean this whole huge chunk of code doesn't have any hardware > > drivers? What good is it then? > > Beats me. I hope we can just bury this infiniband stuff > before we waste any more time on it. > > I really can't see any reason why we would want to have > this. Maybe you don't, but some do. Uses are rare, of course, but: http://www.apple.com/education/science/profiles/vatech/ People building "cheap supercomputers" will be going that way most definitely. Slowest version is 2.5 Gbit/s, and most common one appears to be running 4x that. Another thing (for which I would have use at hand right away, actually) is to have fully functional Fibre Channel subsystem in Linux along with drivers to modern cards e.g. JNI's. (2 Gbit/s FC) Plugging tens of terabytes of disks on a box is somewhat challenging without resorting to that technology... I just don't have luxury of having a year or two to spend on development of necessary things, I need to choose systems with the support readily in place so I can load in my applications, and start using them. :-/ /Matti Aarnio