Subject: Re: [RFC iproute2 0/8] RDMA tool

From: Bart Van Assche <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2017 15:19:28 +0000

On Sun, 2017-05-07 at 12:20 +0200, Jiri Pirko wrote:
> Sat, May 06, 2017 at 04:40:24PM CEST, [email-masked] wrote:
> > On Sat, 2017-05-06 at 12:40 +0200, Jiri Pirko wrote:
> > > Thu, May 04, 2017 at 08:10:54PM CEST, [email-masked] wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 2017-05-04 at 21:02 +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > > > > Following our discussion both in mailing list [1] and at the LPC 2016 [2],
> > > > > we would like to propose this RDMA tool to be part of iproute2 package
> > > > > and finally improve this situation.
> > > > 
> > > > Although I really appreciate your work: can you clarify why you would like to
> > > > add *RDMA* functionality to an *IP routing* tool? I haven't found any motivation
> > > > for adding RDMA functionality to iproute2 in [1].
> > > 
> > > Bart, please realize that iproute2 is much more than "*IP routing* tool".
> > > I understand you got confused by the name. Please see sources. Your comment
> > > is totally pointless...
> > 
> > I asked for a clarification that should have been in the cover letter but that
> > was missing from that cover letter. So I think that was the right thing to do
> 
> I think that was just complete misunderstanding about what iproute2 is.

Hello Jiri,

I do not agree with your reply. The abbreviation "IP" occurs in the package
name and that is a reference to the "Internet Protocol". As far as I know
originally the iproute2 package contained only tools related to the Internet
Protocol. Other tools, e.g. the tipc tool, were added later on. What I'm
wondering about is whether it really is a good idea to add tools like tipc
and rdma to the iproute2 package. The iproute2 package is so essential that
it gets installed on every Linux system, including embedded systems and
smartphones based on Linux. Several companies maintain embedded Linux
distributions and tools to build software images. These tools provide a user
interface that allows to select what packages go into such an image. Adding
tools like tipc and rdma to the iproute2 package makes it harder than
necessary for those who build software images for embedded devices to
minimize the size of such an image. As you probably know even today the size
of a software image still matters for embedded devices. Something else I have
been wondering about is whether bundling the tipc and rdma tools in the
iproute2 package will make the job harder of people who build Android ROMs?
The ip tool is present in every Android ROM, and the size of these ROMs matters
because the larger these ROMs are the less space remains for apps.

Bart.--
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