Ted H. Kim's Weblog

Friday February 06, 2009

IB Updates 3 (OFUV UD)

Finally a timely announcement! Yesterday, Solaris InfiniBand Updates 3 was released. The big addition over the previous Updates 2.1 is the first increment of Open Fabrics User Verbs or OFUV.

What's OFUV you ask? Well, here is the story. Quite a while ago, we delivered uDAPL into Solaris. But over time, with the growing popularity of the Linux OFED InfiniBand releases, OFUV became the pre-dominant OS Bypass InfiniBand framework.

Now the question which comes up from time to time is, "why don't you just port OFED?" The simplified explanation is that it's quite hard to do a straight port for the kernel parts, unless you can completely emulate Linux kernel internals. So instead for the kernel-based InfiniBand services, we are trying to provide equivalent stuff but not necessarily a straight port. But on the userland side of things, it's much more practical to do a port.

So with this new software, we have done a port of userland OFUV APIs on Solaris. Now it's a big project, so this first increment has the Unreliable Datagram (UD) support (based on OFED 1.3 verbs and rdma_cm) and associated drivers (for hermon and tavor), utilities, etc. While the verbs exist for reliable connected (RC) support, the rdma_cm support is not yet in there. Following phases will round out the offering with rdma_cm support for RC and other stuff. And of course, sometime we have to update to OFED 1.4. But finally we have the first part.

So what do you do with userland UD? Lately, it has been used to do high volume, low latency messaging systems on top of InfiniBand, especially in financial services. So stay tuned ...

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2009-02-06 16:56:40.0) Permalink Comments [4]