[CentOS-devel] kmods SIG Proposal

Wed Jun 2 20:52:12 UTC 2021
Peter Georg <peter.georg at physik.uni-regensburg.de>


On 02/06/2021 21.07, Peter Georg wrote:
> 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.

As Josh noted in his answer, these two drivers are available in EL8. 
Somehow I thought these are only available in EL9, but not in EL8. 
Sorry, my fault. Hence my answer above is incorrect and should be 
ignored (at least for now). It is first required to show that these 
out-of-tree version are indeed sufficiently different to the versions 
provided by the EL kernel.