Bill Strahm's Weblog

Saturday August 07, 2004

Running IP over Infiniband Well, for those that don't know me - I am the co-chair of the IETF's IP over Infiniband working group. This is an interesting pair. IP is the industry standard way to do layer 4 networking (OK - throw TCP on top of it for layer 4). Infiniband is a hardware accellerated Layer 4 protocol suite.

So now we want to run a layer 3 protocol on top of Layer 4 infiniband. Plus there are some issues around not having a broadcast address in Infiniband so we have to create a multicast group in Infiniband to "broadcast" ARP traffic over. There are also interesting issues involving what is a Layer 2 address, and how to turn a long lived Infiniband Layer 2 address (GID, QPN) into something that you can put into an infiniband packet (LID)

How did the working group meeting go. Pretty well. I think we will have the final Encapsulation Draft into the IESG's hands by the end of the month - and make progress on DHCP (need to work with the DHCP WG chairs to have someone look it over their) and the SNMP MIB drafts. I will make it a personal goal to get the Encapsulation and DHCP drafts into the IESGs hands by the November IETF, and the first 3 MIB drafts ready for the IESG as well.

(2004-08-07 13:40:00.0) Permalink