RHEA-2006:0136 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

Multiple new packages that provide a technology preview of
Infiniband support are now available.

Description

This is a technology preview release of the upstream OpenIB.org Infiniband
network and clustering software stack. Infiniband is a high speed, low
latency network interconnect being used primarily in large compute clusters
and other applications where speed and latency of the network interconnect
are paramount to performance.

Note that this technology preview release is not supported for use in
production environments, and that the OpenIB Infiniband interfaces and APIs
are subject to change during the technology preview phase. Not all of the
Infiniband upper layer protocols are implemented in the current upstream
OpenIB project. As more upper layer protocols are implemented by the
OpenIB group, a fully supported release of the OpenIB Infiniband
network/clustering stack is planned.

The overall technology preview currently includes the following updated or
newly added packages:

• kernel (under separate advisory)
• udev (under separate advisory)
• initscripts (under separate advisory)
• module-init-tools
• libibverbs
• libmthca
• libsdp
• opensm
• udapl

Infiniband technologies implemented in this preview are:

kernel - Low level driver support for Mellanox based host controllers, the
core Infiniband modules necessary to interface between the low level
hardware driver and the upper layer Infiniband protocol drivers and to
provide user space access to Infiniband hardware, the Sockets Direct
Protocol upper layer kernel driver, the IPoIB TCP/IP networking protocol
driver, and the SCSI RDMA protocol driver.

udev - Minor modifications to know where to place the new Infiniband device
files

initscripts - Added a new ifup-ib network script to enable using IPoIB
networking at boot time.

module-init-tools - Minor modifications to know about the new SDP socket
protocol and IPoIB interfaces

libibverbs - A library to provide direct user space access to the RDMA
verbs capabilities of Infiniband hardware. Developers wishing to program
to the verbs interface can program to the libibverbs API and as new
hardware support is added their application will require no modifications.

libmthca - A low level hardware driver library that plugs into libibverbs
and actually talks to the hardware on libibverbs behalf. Support for
future hardware will be implemented as additional libraries.

libsdp - An LD_PRELOADable library that allows users to cause their
existing TCP/IP network applications to use the Sockets Direct Protocol
instead without the need to recompile their application

opensm - The Open Subnet Manager. At least one machine in any Infiniband
network must be running a subnet manager in order to configure the low
level hardware link routing. This is usually left running as a system
daemon to handle reconfiguration of the subnet fabric on link status change
events.

udapl - This is a high level user space RDMA programming environment. The
udapl library allows applications to take advantage of RDMA protocols
without having to be aware of how to program the RDMA capable hardware.
The udapl specification is not Infiniband specific, and in the future
should support RDMA hardware other than Infiniband, such as RDMA enabled
10GBit ethernet controllers.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. To use Red Hat Network,
launch the Red Hat Update Agent with the following command:

up2date

This will start an interactive process that will result in the appropriate
RPMs being upgraded on your system.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 4 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 108827 - RHEL4: Infiniband support

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)