GID clarifications
Kanoj Sarcar <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.ipoib |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi, It seems that certain parts of the draft-ietf-ipoib-ip-over-infiniband-05.txt draft might require clarification. For this discussion, please refer to 1. section 9.1 Link Information says: "The GID, if formed using the GUID, can be used to unambiguously identify an endpoint." 2. section 9.1.1 Link Layer Address/Hardware Address, part c) says: "It is RECOMMENDED that the GID formed by the combination of the IB subnet prefix and the port's GUID be included in the link-layer/hardware address." Can comment #2 be safely taken to mean that GID index 0 is being RECOMMENDED? Port GUID seems somewhat ambiguous, since I am not sure (after reading IBA 1.1 section 4.1) whether the term GUID refers only to the manufacturer assigned value that appears in lower 64 bits of GID index 0, or whether it also includes lower 64 bits of SM assigned GIDs at higher indices. If GID index 0 was really intended, the comment should explicitly state so to prevent confusion. Also, to make things simple, is it reasonable to REQUIRE implementations to always use GID index 0 (maybe this depends on whether existing implementations all use GID0 only)? The reason this might be interesting is that when a node receives a packet without a GRH (whereby it already knows the sender's LID and QPN), it can possibly reverse lookup the sender's LID to identify the sender's GID index 0 and concatenate the sender's QPN to figure out the sender's link address. Thus, a receiver can always figure out the sender's address, even when a GRH is not present. This would be similar to ethernet, where a receiver can always determine a sender's address, and thus is more DLPIv2 (unitdata_indication) friendly. Regarding comment #1, what does "unambiguously identify an endpoint" mean? GIDs are unique in the subnet; and if an IP link contains members in multiple IBA subnets, the subnet prefixes will disambiguate which endport is being referred. Thanks. Kanoj