One Line Summary

Abstract

I will talk about my experiences as lead developer for the RDMA provider
library and kernel driver for SIF, Oracle’s new Infiniband HCA.

I was brought in early in the project as a developer with broad experience
in software engineering and a good understanding of the
challenges and opportunities of RDMA technology and driver development
(a Ph.D and experience from pre-Inifinband technology for RDMA (SCI,VIA))
but as new to Infiniband and the RDMA stack.

The software project was started well ahead of having any hardware
available, and most of the driver and user level library was developed
in parallel with a high level system model and an RTL level simulation
environment while hardware was still under development.

An additional challenge was that we due to corporate constraints
had to do most of this work with very limited opportunity
to consult the community except by using available public information.

This talk will focus on how and where features and APIs of the RDMA stack
helped us getting to our goal and where we faced issues and obstacles
during this work, personal and team lessons learned from this effort,
with the goal of highlighting what should be left as it
is, and where we see opportunities for improvement.

I’ll try to put this in the context of the latest hard work by the
community to bring the RDMA stack forward.

Tags

RDMA kernel driver oracle infiniband network

Speaker

• Knut Omang

  Biography

  Knut Omang has had a relationship with Unix and Linux since the mid-eighties. He wrote a Ph.D on SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) based I/O adapters, an early predecessor of today’s RDMA devices. He currently works at Oracle as the lead developer for the driver and user space library for Oracle’s new Infiniband HCA.