Re: [9fans] pcie for inter machine comms

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> > Has anyone done up a driver for an infiniband interface?
>
> let's not go there.
>
> we looked at it in 2005 and the IB stack is so awful that it's not
> something anyone wants to touch. It works on LInux, works on few other
> systems, it's pretty much a headache.
>
> There's a reason that some Big Companies got out of IB.

there are fewer infiniband-only chipsets out there than there
used to be.  most ib hardware is actually a "converged" network
adapter, which means you can also do ethernet.  it's interesting
to do a line count on some of the linux drivers.  they tend toward
many tens of kloc.  you just haven't lived till you've taken a peek
at a 50kloc driver.  it may be that a reasonable ethernet or tcp/ib
driver could be written.

- erik