The trouble with SMC-R

Among the many features merged for the 4.11 kernel was the "shared memory communications over RDMA" (SMC-R) protocol from IBM. SMC-R is a high-speed data-center communications protocol that is claimed to be much more efficient than basic TCP sockets. As it turns out, though, the merging of this code was a surprise — and an unpleasant one at that — to a relevant segment of the kernel development community. This issue and the difficulties in resolving it are an indicator of how the increasingly fast-paced kernel development community can go off track.

Full Story (comments: 13)