[CentOS-devel] kmods SIG Proposal

Wed Jun 2 19:07:13 UTC 2021
Peter Georg <peter.georg at physik.uni-regensburg.de>

On 02/06/2021 19.02, David Duncan via CentOS-devel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The kmods SIG looks like a great place to introduce the out-of-tree
> versions of the ENA and EFA drivers for supporting Amazon EC2
> instances. If this is the right place for that work, I would like to
> add my support by contributing effort to maintain them here.
> 

I don't know the ENA and EFA drivers in details, so my conclusion may 
not be accurate. But after having a short look I can not see any 
immediate reasons that speak against it.

Only the optional GPUDirect RDMA for EFA may not be enabled as it 
depends on the proprietary nVidia driver which we can not provide due to 
legal reasons.

And I have not had a close look at the rdma-core and/or libfabric 
packages in CentOS Stream 8 for some while, hence I do not know whether 
these have enabled all bits required by the EFA driver. However I can 
vaguely remember seeing updates to add EFA support for both. But even 
without the kernel modules themselves might be useful for some users.


Tl;dr: IMO the kmods SIG is a good place for such work.

Probably the easiest way to maintain these is to join the (proposed) 
kmods SIG. Other SIG members can help with packaging related issues, but 
making sure that both drivers still compile and work after a new kernel 
update would then probably be mainly up to you.

Please let me know if you want to join this SIG.