[Beowulf] any creative ways to crash Linux?: does a shared NIC IMPI always remain responsive?

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> it's surprising that it works at all, since there's no real
> standard for sharing the hardware.

I don't think that a standard is actually needed... My naive
understanding is that the NIC firmware does packet inspection (no need
for deep packet inspection, only MAC and IP headers are enough) and
doesn't allow the main system to see that there is a packet if the
packet had the BMC as the destination and doesn't allow the BMC to see
that there is a packet if the packet had the main system as the
destination. Then both the main system and the BMC can use the same
way of accessing the NIC, as documented by the NIC vendor - no
standard required. Hmmm, actually re-reading what I just wrote, sounds
too good to be true so I might miss something :-)

--
Bogdan