The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver.
ROCEv2 as the Internet layer protocol for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is now supported by the ERDMA driver. ERDMA in turn is the RDMA driver for Alibaba Elastic RDMA Adapters (ERDMA). Alibaba engineers explained in the patch series introducing ROCEv2 support:
“This patch series introduces support for the RoCEv2 protocol into the erdma driver. As the most prevalent RDMA protocol, RoCEv2 is widely used in the production environment. Given the extensive application of erdma across various scenarios in the Alibaba Cloud, there has arisen a requirement for erdma to support the RoCEv2 protocol. Therefore, we update both the erdma hardware and the erdma driver to accommodate the RoCEv2 protocol.”
This ERDMA driver support follows the likes of the NVIDIA Mellanox driver that have already been supporting ROCEv2 within the mainline Linux kernel for remote direct memory access over Ethernet networks. But outside of the Alibaba Cloud, the ERDMA driver isn’t of much (any?) use.
The full list of RDMA updates that were merged for Linux 6.14 can be found via this pull request.
