Ted H. Kim's Weblog

Friday May 29, 2009

Solaris/IB and Open Source

OpenSolaris is known for being open source. In the InfiniBand area, the framework and most Upper Level Protocols (ULPs) were open source right from the start of OpenSolaris. However, we had to keep the Host Channel Adapter (HCA) drivers in closed source because of prior legal agreements. Well this took a while to sort out, and then finally make the changes to the source tree.

So I am happy to announce that the HCA drivers are now open source. You can look at them here.

There is still part of one ULP (Sockets Direct Protocol) which is in closed source, but that is the only remaining Solaris/IB item in closed source. Unfortunately, it is not likely to change any time soon, because of the way SDP was licensed. For similar reasons, even Linux/OFED has some problems in this area.

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2009-05-29 10:54:31.0) Permalink

Wednesday May 27, 2009

SRP target

As noted here, the SRP target for COMSTAR just went back to Solaris Nevada, which is of course the base for future OpenSolaris releases. So now, Solaris can be an SRP target as well as an iSER target or an NFS/RDMA server. So you can get your blocks and files through all the popular flavors of RDMA protocols on IB.

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2009-05-27 14:25:31.0) Permalink

Thursday May 14, 2009

Java can use SDP

Here is an item that was recently pointed out to me. You can now configure Java to use Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) on InfiniBand, see this article.

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2009-05-14 14:37:16.0) Permalink

Monday May 11, 2009

DDR FEM

Along with all the other Nehalem announcements related to IB was one other IB related item which I haven't talked about yet. That's the X4239A DDR Fabric Expansion Module (FEM). It's an HCA with PCIe 2.0 I/O interfaces and dual DDR 4x IB ports for connection to the in-chasis IB fabrics.

Now the x6275 blade has a QDR HCAs built in. So what would you do with this item? After looking here, it appears that you use it with the x6270 blade to connect them to the QNEM.

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2009-05-11 15:55:24.0) Permalink

Friday May 01, 2009

ConnectX driver in Solaris 10

With the release of Solaris 10 5/09 (aka Solaris 10 Update 7), the ConnectX HCA driver (called "hermon") finally makes it's appearance in Solaris 10. It has been available in OpenSolaris since Nevada build 100. But now it finally makes its way to the Solaris 10. Download Solaris 10 5/09 here. And of course it's free.

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2009-05-01 13:58:28.0) Permalink