Re: [NFS] Merge plans for RPC/RDMA? (Was: Re: [PATCH 000 of 14] knfsd: Preparation for IPv6 support in NFS server.)

[James Lentini <jlentini@netapp.com>]

On Sat, 14 Apr 2007, Mike Snitzer wrote:

> On 4/13/07, Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 16:47 -0400, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> > > I must be missing something because I don't see _any_ trace of the
> > > core RPC over RDMA support (xprtrdma et al), your RPC Transport
> > > Switch, or any of the other supporting changes in mainline.  Could
> > > you, or others, please clarify the plan for merging RPC/RDMA?
> > 
> > That would be a question for the actual RPC/RDMA developers (i.e. James
> > Lentini and Tom Talpey). They haven't submitted any code for review yet.
> 
> The reason I asked is there seems to be a catch-22 going on here if
> (as Chuck indicated) the NetApp engineers are waiting for the
> remaining rpc transport switch patches to be merged.  My naive
> understanding is that those remaining transport switch patches aren't
> _really_ needed without the RPC/RDMA patches.
> 
> Essentially I'm echoing Or Gerlitz's post to openib-general back in December:
> http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/general/2006-December/029721.html
> 
> If so, it begs the question: why the hold up from the NetApp
> engineers?  In the hopes of getting some insight I've cc'd James
> Lentini and Tom Talpey.
> 
> I'm assuming that all of you obviously want your code merged mainline.
> The thing that is puzzling is the non-traditional release management
> of this RPC/RDMA and NFS/RDMA code.  Aside from the periodic
> announcements of the tarball updates to the sf.net nfs-rdma project;
> I've not found any posting/discussion of associated patches to the
> various mailing lists (nfs, nfsv4, ofa's general, lkml, etc).
> 
> I'm interested in understanding why the reluctance to push for a merge
> now (let alone some months ago) given the various successes that have
> been seen with the NFS/RDMA effort (Sandia, SC '06, as Chuck noted:
> good performance at various test sites).  If the code is holding up
> well why the delay in review and merging?  And rather than wait for
> the remaining transport switch patches; why not look to merge all of
> NFS/RDMA (client) work at the same time?

There is no reluctance to submit the NFS-RDMA code for review. There 
have been several upstream changes to the NFS server recently. We 
(NetApp and Tom Tucker at OGC) are working on a new patchset for 
NFS-RDMA that is compatible with these changes. We are testing the 
code now. 

We will post the patches for review when we finish updating them.