Re: [Ksummit-2005-discuss] Summary of 2005 Kernel Summit Proposed Topics

[Dmitry Yusupov <dmitry_yus@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 17:32 -0500, Benjamin LaHaise wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 12:48:56PM -0800, Dmitry Yusupov wrote:
> > If you have plans to start new project such as SoftRDMA than yes. lets
> > discuss it since set of problems will be similar to what we've got with
> > software iSCSI Initiators.
> 
> I'm somewhat interested in seeing a SoftRDMA project get off the ground.  
> At least the NatSemi 83820 gige MAC is able to provide early-rx interrupts 
> that allow one to get an rx interrupt before the full payload has arrived 
> making it possible to write out a new rx descriptor to place the payload 
> wherever it is ultimately desired.  It would be fun to work on if not the 
> most performant RDMA implementation.

I see a lot of skepticism around early-rx interrupt schema. It might
work for gige, but i'm not sure if it will fit into 10g.

What RDMA gives us is zero-copy on receive and new networking api which
has a potential to be HW accelerated. SoftRDMA will never avoid copying
on receive. But benefit for SoftRDMA would be its availability on client
sides. It is free and it could be easily deployed. Soon Intel & Co will
give us 2,4,8... multi-core CPUs for around 200$ :), So, who cares if
one of those cores will do receive side copying?