10. Release Notes

10.1. Version 0.2

In progress

Notable Bug Fixes:

• rdma.devices.RDMADevice.node_desc had a trailing \n
• ibverbs tracks multicast joins in QPs so they can be undone during closing, fixs up a failure to clean up during exceptions in some cases.
• MADSchedule could loose the RPC result if it got too busy.
• rdma.discovery.topo_SMP() did not strictly enforce BFS order and could overrun the hop limit.
• Non-end ports were ending up some of the subnet structures

Notable Features/Improvements:

• rdma.path.from_string() is a very general string to path parser. Includes support for parsing the repr() format of IBPath, which basically makes everything possible from the command line.
• rdma.subnet.Subnet.advance_dr() is used to advance a DR path, and it understands how to deal with trying to DR from a non switch port.
• rdma.subnet.Port.port_id
• rdma.path.resolve_path() and rdma.path.get_mad_path() can be used with MADSchedule, or synchronously.
• Support for acting as a GMP server, including vendor MADs and vendor MADs with OUIs. See rdma.madtransactor.MADTransactor.parse_request()

ibtool:

• Better target address parsing using rdma.path.from_string()
• Add set_nodedesc[.sh]
• Add ibtracert
• Add ibswportwatch
• Add iblinkinfo
• Add subnet_diff (aka ibdiscover.pl)
• Single node fabric check functions: ibchecknode, ibcheckportstate, ibcheckportwidth, ibcheckerrs, and ibdatacounts
• Full topology check functions: ibcheckstate, ibcheckwidth, ibchecknet, ibcheckerrors, ibclearcounters, ibclearerrors, ibdatacounters, and ibidsverify.
• MAD server functions vendstat, ibsysstat and ibping
• New set_port_state and init_all_ports commands

10.2. Version 0.1 Initial Release

March 15, 2011

I am pleased to announce the initial release of python-rdma a package to provide a Python API for the Linux RDMA stack. This initial release is mainly focused on IB specific management APIs, but the package also covers ibverbs.

A new API was developed for this library that is designed to take advantage of Python features and provides a very uniform, integrated design across all the different aspects of IB and RDMA programming. It has a particular focus on ease of use and correct operation of the IB and RDMA protocol stacks.

Included is a re-implementation of a substantial portion of the infinband-diags package. This re-implementation is functionally very similar to infiniband-diags but also gains a number of new features:

• Uniform end port addressing. All commands support GID, port GUID, LID and DR path, even commands that are GMP based (like perfquery).
• Support for collecting information entirely from the SA via the –sa option.
• Consistently fetches path records for GMP communication (eg in perfquery) to support topologies with special requirements.
• Extensive MAD parallelization provides very good performance.
• All commands support a discovery cache file, which stores information in an efficient binary format.
• Much better debugging, including packet tracing down to full field decode.
• Minor new features to many tools, review section 8 of the manual for details.

The library itself is intended mainly for applications where quick development is more important that the highest performance, such as:

• IB manamagent software development
• RDMA test development
• Training and problem exploration

Although already quite complete there are a few obvious areas that I hope to have finished in the future:

• Integration of IB and RDMA CMs
• Support for RMPP when using verbs to issue GMPs - this will enable all diags to function in –sa mode without access to /dev/umad.
• Completion of missing infinband-diags commands

It is my hope this work will be of use to the wider InfiniBand community.

Extensive prebuilt documentation for the module can be reviewed online, and the source code is available on GitHub.