InfiniBand Feature Improvements

The Solaris 10 5/09 release includes the following InfiniBand-related enhancements:

• InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA) – The Solaris 10 5/09 release includes a significantly enhanced InfiniBand driver for the Mellanox ConnectX HCA. The InfiniBand driver enables InfiniBand protocols to operate over both Double Data Rate (DDR) and Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand fabrics. The driver is also integrated into the Solaris FMA framework for fault management and the driver supports relaxed ordering on SPARC systems.

• InfiniBand Transport Framework (IBTF) – The Solaris 10 5/09 release includes a significantly improved IBTF implementation that provides enhanced support for running RDMA-based InfiniBand protocols in Solaris. InfiniBand for SPARC now supports both the PCI Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR).

• Internet Protocol over InfiniBand (IPoIB) – The Solaris 10 5/09 release includes a significantly improved IPoIB driver (ibd) supporting Internet RFCs 4391 and 4392. The IPoIB driver in the Solaris 10 5/09 release supports the User Datagram (UD) mode of operation, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, and takes advantage of hardware offloads in the ConnectX HCA for improved throughput at lower CPU utilization. IPoIB-UD enables the use of any TCP/IP application protocol such as SSH, HTTP, FTP, NFS, and iSCSI over both Double Data Rate (DDR) and Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand fabrics. The new IPoIB driver for both SPARC and x86 platforms offers a significant performance boost over the previously available driver.

• Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) – The Solaris 10 5/09 release includes a significantly improved SDP driver and sockfs implementation. SDP is a transport protocol layered over the Infiniband Transport Framework (IBTF). SDP is a standard implementation based on Annex 4 of the Infiniband Architecture Specification Vol 1. The SDP protocol provides reliable byte-stream, flow controlled two-way data transmission that is similar to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). InfiniBand programmers use SDP through the libsdp C library that supports a sockets-based SOCK_STREAM interface to application programs. The SDP protocol supports graceful close, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, the connecting/accepting connect model, out-of-band (OOB) data and common socket options. The SDP protocol also supports kernel bypass data transfers and data transfers from send-upper-layer-protocol (ULP) buffers to receive ULP buffers.

• Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) – The Solaris 10 5/09 release includes an improved RDSv1 driver certified for use with Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) 10gR2.

• User-Level Direct Access Programming Library (uDAPL) – The Solaris 10 5/09 release includes an updated uDAPL over InfiniBand API that conforms to the latest Direct Access Transport (DAT) Collaborative uDAPL 1.2 specification.