openstack team mailing list archive

["Caitlin Bestler" <Caitlin.Bestler@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Khamis asked:

> I was wondering if any effort has been made regarding supporting
infiniband
>devices to support I/O Virtualization, RDMA etc..? If so, can you
please direct
>me to the latest documentation.


Adding RDMA support to OpenStack will be a challenge with the current
software architecture.

What is really needed is adding zero-copy I/O to eventlet socket I/O.
Explicit RDMA semantics
being visible to OpenStack code would only be possible if *every* device
in a cluster supported
RDMA, and that would happen so seldom that the code taking explicit
advantage of RDMA would
Become a maintenance liability.

But refactoring the eventlet sockets I/O to use I/O virtualization when
available is distinctly possible.
It would be major work, but would greatly reduce the memory bandwidth
consumption. What you
would need to do is convince one of the high speed NIC vendors (10 GbE
or InfiniBand) that it was
worthwhile to invest in some Python libraries.