Benjamin> Agreed. After working on a full TOE implementation, I
Benjamin> think that the niche market most TOE vendors are
Benjamin> pursuing is not one that the Linux community will ever
Benjamin> develop for. Hardware vendors that gradually add
Benjamin> offloading features from the NIC realm to speed up the
Benjamin> existing network stack are a much better fit with Linux.
I have to admit I don't know much about the TOE / RDMA/TCP / RNIC (or
whatever you want to call it) world. However I know that the large
majority of InfiniBand use right now is running on Linux, and I hope
the Linux community is willing to work with the IB community.
InfiniBand adoption is strong right now, with lots of large clusters
being built. It seems reasonable that RDMA/TCP should be able to
compete in the same market. Whether InfiniBand or RDMA/TCP or both
will survive or prosper is a good question, and I think it's too early
to tell yet.
- R.
|