Documentation/infiniband/ipoib.rst
Source file repositories/reference/linux-study-clean/Documentation/infiniband/ipoib.rst
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- System
- Linux kernel
- Corpus path
Documentation/infiniband/ipoib.rst- Extension
.rst- Size
- 4524 bytes
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- 116
- Domain
- Support Tooling And Documentation
- Bucket
- Documentation
- Inferred role
- Support Tooling And Documentation: documentation
- Status
- atlas-only
Why This File Exists
Repository support layer: documentation, build tooling, samples, user-space helper tools, generated initramfs support, licenses, and validation utilities.
- Repository support layer: documentation, build tooling, samples, user-space helper tools, generated initramfs support, licenses, and validation utilities.
Dependency Surface
- No C-style include directives detected by the generator.
Detected Declarations
- No top-level syscall, struct, function, initcall, or export declaration detected by the generator.
Annotated Snippet
==================
IP over InfiniBand
==================
The ib_ipoib driver is an implementation of the IP over InfiniBand
protocol as specified by RFC 4391 and 4392, issued by the IETF ipoib
working group. It is a "native" implementation in the sense of
setting the interface type to ARPHRD_INFINIBAND and the hardware
address length to 20 (earlier proprietary implementations
masqueraded to the kernel as ethernet interfaces).
Partitions and P_Keys
=====================
When the IPoIB driver is loaded, it creates one interface for each
port using the P_Key at index 0. To create an interface with a
different P_Key, write the desired P_Key into the main interface's
/sys/class/net/<intf name>/create_child file. For example::
echo 0x8001 > /sys/class/net/ib0/create_child
This will create an interface named ib0.8001 with P_Key 0x8001. To
remove a subinterface, use the "delete_child" file::
echo 0x8001 > /sys/class/net/ib0/delete_child
The P_Key for any interface is given by the "pkey" file, and the
main interface for a subinterface is in "parent."
Child interface create/delete can also be done using IPoIB's
rtnl_link_ops, where children created using either way behave the same.
Datagram vs Connected modes
===========================
The IPoIB driver supports two modes of operation: datagram and
connected. The mode is set and read through an interface's
/sys/class/net/<intf name>/mode file.
In datagram mode, the IB UD (Unreliable Datagram) transport is used
and so the interface MTU has is equal to the IB L2 MTU minus the
IPoIB encapsulation header (4 bytes). For example, in a typical IB
fabric with a 2K MTU, the IPoIB MTU will be 2048 - 4 = 2044 bytes.
In connected mode, the IB RC (Reliable Connected) transport is used.
Connected mode takes advantage of the connected nature of the IB
transport and allows an MTU up to the maximal IP packet size of 64K,
which reduces the number of IP packets needed for handling large UDP
datagrams, TCP segments, etc and increases the performance for large
messages.
In connected mode, the interface's UD QP is still used for multicast
and communication with peers that don't support connected mode. In
this case, RX emulation of ICMP PMTU packets is used to cause the
networking stack to use the smaller UD MTU for these neighbours.
Stateless offloads
==================
If the IB HW supports IPoIB stateless offloads, IPoIB advertises
TCP/IP checksum and/or Large Send (LSO) offloading capability to the
network stack.
Large Receive (LRO) offloading is also implemented and may be turned
on/off using ethtool calls. Currently LRO is supported only for
checksum offload capable devices.
Stateless offloads are supported only in datagram mode.
Interrupt moderation
Annotation
- Atlas domain: Support Tooling And Documentation / Documentation.
- Implementation status: atlas-only.
Implementation Notes
- This generated page is the file-by-file coverage layer; curated subsystem chapters should link here when they synthesize a multi-file control flow.
- Core OS pages should be promoted from atlas-only to deep-reviewed when they explain data structures, invariants, locking, lifecycle, and C implementation snippets.
- Driver-family pages are intentionally pattern-oriented unless they are part of the selected PCIe/NVMe representative device path.