repost -- Linux M-VIA 0.9.3 released by Patrick Bozeman and Bill Saphir

[Ted Matsumura]

fyi --

-----Original Message-----
From:	Patrick Bozeman [SMTP:peb@george.lbl.gov]
Sent:	Friday, April 09, 1999 5:15 PM
To:	via-announce@nersc.gov
Subject:	M-VIA 0.9.3 Available


We are pleased to announce the 3rd release of M-VIA, the high
performance modular implementation of Virtual Interface Architecture for
Linux. Release notes are include at the end of this message.

M-VIA 0.9.3 can be downloaded from

     http://www.nersc.gov/cgi-bin/via/download

M-VIA information is available at
    
     http://www.nersc.gov/research/FTG/via

Patrick Bozeman and Bill Saphir

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
Berkeley Lab

ps. You are receiving this message because you have previously
    downloaded M-VIA or because you have asked to be notified.  

========

Release Notes

0.9.3 April 9, 1999.

Highlights

With the release of version 0.9.3, M-VIA is on the verge of providing
complete Functional Conformance to the VIPL API. M-VIA has been Early
Adopter conformant since its initial release and version 0.9.3 includes key
functionality and infrastructure to move to the next level of conformance.

The major components of this release are support for asynchronous remote
disconnect notification, pthreads compatibility, and a new connection
manager. These components provide increased functionality to the application
developer as well as necessary functionality and infrastructure for
achieving Functional Conformance.

Remote disconnect notification allows user applications to detect and
gracefully recover from broken connections. Moreover, it provides one of the
missing components of Functional Conformance from previous version of M-VIA,
allowing M-VIA to pass many more Intel conformance suite tests.

Pthreads compatibility provides application developers the ability to write
multi-threaded applications and is the first step in providing a completely
thread safe VIPL. Operations performed within a multi-threaded application
on different VIs are inherently thread safe, but an application must
currently provide its own explicit locks if multiple threads access a single
VI. The use of pthreads instead of the Linux specific clone system call used
in previous versions is the first step in the development of a fully thread
safe VIPL. Additionally, the use of pthreads will enable the development of
the VIPL asynchronous Notify functions.

The new connection manager is more robust than in the previous versions of
M-VIA. The previous connection manager was a prototype to provide the
required user level connection management features, however, under certain
circumstances it would fail, resulting in a machine lockup. The new
connection manager also makes it easier to develop the peer-to-peer
connection routines required for Functional Conformance.

Details

   * Asynchronous remote disconnect notification is delivered in the event
     of an error on a remote VI, allowing user applications to detect and
     gracefully recover from broken connections.

   * Single-processor loopback performance has been significantly improved
     by dynamically configuring the spin wait based on the number of CPUs
     and weather the connection is local or remote.

   * M-VIA is now pthreads compatible, allowing users to write
     multi-threaded applications.

     M-VIA applications must now be compiled with -D_REENTRANT and linked
     with the -lpthread flag. In addition, glibc 2 is required (we have not
     tested M-VIA with previous versions.)

     Note, this change does not cause extra overhead to be incurred by the
     user application. Previous releases used a thread to handle
     asynchronous errors, but did so in a non-portable way (using the clone
     system call.) The error handler thread is blocked until an error occurs
     and does not consume CPU cycles.

     The use of signals to trigger the error handler was ruled out because
     the Linux pthreads library uses SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 internally and
     pthreads compatibility is an M-VIA goal. However, a future version of
     M-VIA will provide a compile time option as to weather to use signals
     or pthreads for asynchronous error handling.

   * Connection management has been made more robust. The previous
     connection manager was a prototype to provide the required user level
     connection management features, however, under certain circumstances it
     would fail, resulting in a machine lockup. Additionally, the new
     connection management paves the road for the development of
     peer-to-peer connection management services.

   * Linux 2.2.X support.

   * Updated M-VIA tulip driver to use the Linux 2.2.x tulip driver as its
     base.

   * Fixed a machine lockup which would occur after disconnecting a VI with
     circular work queues, i.e. reposting a descriptor before it has
     completed.

   * Changed the the MaxReliabilityLevel attribute of the VIP_NIC_ATTRIBUTES
     structure to ReliabilityLevelSupport to conform with the 1.0
     specification.

   * Changed the the RDMARead attribute of the VIP_NIC_ATTRIBUTES structure
     to RDMAReadSupport to conform with the 1.0 specification.

   * Changed memory deregistration to use free_page instead of atomic_dec of
     the page count. This allows Linux to reclaim the memory more quickly.
     (Thanks to Matt Welsh for pointing this out.)

   * Removed SMP configuration from Makefile.config. This is now handled
     automatically in the linux kernel headers.

   * The license has been changed so that it does not repeat what
     is already required by U.S. export control law (e.g. restriction 
     on export to rogue states). 
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