LinuxConf Europe 2007

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Roland Dreier – Cisco

TUTORIAL 2 HALF-DAY: Writing RDMA applications on Linux

RDMA networking technologies (InfiniBand (IB), and iWARP over 10 gigabit ethernet) offer application developers high throughput and low latency with low CPU overhead. Throughput in excess of 1 gigabyte/sec and application-to-application latency under 2 microseconds is achievable with current hardware.

This tutorial will introduce Linux developers to RDMA technology, including the key concepts of remote DMA, transport offload, and kernel bypass. The current Linux RDMA stack, including both kernel drivers and userspace libraries will also be described.

The tutorial will then give a hands-on introduction to writing RDMA applications for Linux that can run on both InfiniBand and iWARP networks, using the librdmacm and libibverbs libraries. librdmacm abstracts the connection set-up operations so that applications can use IP addressing on both IB and iWARP networks. libibverbs is the core RDMA library that allows applications to use RDMA adapter hardware directly (kernel bypass).

At the end of the tutorial, participants will have learned about the concepts used for libibverbs programming (protection domains, completion queues, queue pairs, and memory regions) and will be able to write code that can take full advantage of RDMA hardware.