Conformance

The only functionality left to be implemented for Functional and Full Conformance is peer-to-peer connection management.

Core Functionality

The major items we are planning for M-VIA 2.0 are:

• Better native VIA hardware support. (The major feature of 2.0)
• Support for M-VIA on the Alpha processor.
• Reliable delivery.
• Thread safe VIPL.
• M-VIA VIPL kernel bindings.

Additional Drivers

Support for the following devices is planned.

• Myrinet
• ServerNet-II
• Synfinity
• GigaNet
• ACEnic gigabit card by Alteon.
• SysKonnect
• 3Com "Boomerang" Fast Ethernet cards
  (A partially working 3Com driver is included with M-VIA 1.0).

Applications

• MPI over VIA.
• Port Intel VIA Performance Suite to Linux.
• Port Intel VI Architecture Example Application Code to Linux.

General TODOs

The following is the list of known ToDo items. These will incorporated into minor releases.

High Priority

• Add more robust flow-control (in progress).
• Add additional device support per users request.
• Clean up prototype Ethernet Ring code (in progress).
• Complete implementation documentation.

Medium Priority

• Write permanent connection management routines. (The routines have been rewritten, but are a prototype implementation.)
• Reorganize vipk_ops.c.
• Divide vipk.h into more logical components.
• Add Pentium profiling support and profile code.
• Perform optimization of critical paths.
• Conditionally compile paranoid checking required by the conformance suite.
• Add additional hooks to better support native VIA hardware.
• Summarize specification problems and questions identified by SPEC tags in the source code.
• Use debugging malloc/free code to check for memory leaks.

Low Priority

• Improve name service routines.
• Add additional run time checks to internal kernel functions.
• Add command line module switches to configure run-time behavior of modules.
• Rename the Vipk*Cq functions to Vipk*CQ for consistency.
• Move VIP_NET_ADDRESS from NIC structure as it is now only used during the VipQueryNic call.
• Reorganize vipl_private.h into separate modules.
• Group VIPL routines into grouped source files rather than one file per function.
• Allocate an unused entry from a fixed-size table of N entries using an O(1) algorithm rather than O(N). This affects M-VIA in many places.

BUGS

This is a partial list of known bugs which are not known to be fixed (thought they might have been fixed incidentally as the result of other changes).

• There is/was a bug where a SendWait() which failed to catch the completion in the spin wait phase would not properly wake up from the sleep when the send completed. If the timeout was not VIP_INFINITE then when the sleep timed-out the completion would finally be detected. Somehow this bug mysteriously disappeared when unrelated changes were made. Thus this bug might be fixed or might just currently be hidden.
• Passing invalid CQ handles to some functions might result in a kernel panic.
• The eepro100 driver keeps TX statistics (packets and bytes sent) for normal IP traffic, but not for M-VIA traffic.
• The yellowfin driver fails to keep TX byte counts for both IP and M-VIA traffic.
• There might still be memory leaks.