Subject: [Gen-art] Gen-ART LC Review of draft-ietf-nfsv4-rpcrdma-07.txt

From: "Eric Gray" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:20:05 -0500

Author(s),

I have been selected as the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) 
reviewer for this draft (for background on Gen-ART, please see 
http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/gen-art-FAQ.html). 

Please wait for direction from your document shepherd 
or AD before posting a new version of the draft. 

Document: draft-ietf-nfsv4-rpcrdma-07.txt

Reviewer:		Eric Gray
Review Date:	03/17/2008

Summary:

This document is nearly ready to publish as a Proposed Standard 
RFC. 

COMMENTS/QUESTIONS
==================

In the first paragraph of section 3, there is some text about
the fact that the RDMA header is analogous to record marking,
as used for RPC over TCP, but is more extensive, because "RDMA 
transports support several modes of data transfer" and we want 
to allow the client and server to use efficient transfer modes.

Is the transfer mode negotiable between the client and server,
or are more efficient modes simply well enough defined that 
either could make this decision on its own?
__________________________________________________________________

In the last paragraph before section 3.1, you include this 
(paraphrased) text:

"An upper layer may [...] define an exchange to dynamically 
 enable RPC/RDMA on an existing RPC association.  Any such
 exchange must be carefully architected so as to prevent any
 ambiguity as to the framing in use for each side of the
 connection."

This does not look like the sort of statement we should be 
making in a proposed standard.  The entire (paraphrased) 
quote above - especially the phrase "must be carefully 
architected" - is at least a little too vague.  Does this
specification (or another) provide support for this as an 
option?  Are there pre-conditions and signaling needs at
the higher layer?  Or, is it enough simply to say that the
same approach must be consistently used within any single
message?

It sounds like this is something that needs to be defined at
a specific level (such as at the application level) and that
entities at that level need to ensure that specific things 
are correctly handled.  In this case, I'm being vague because
I don't know the protocols involved well enough to be more
specific about what "specific things" and "correctly handled"
mean - but I strongly suspect that "carefully architected"
doesn't cover it.

My suggestion is to remove (or rephrase) the last 3 sentences 
in that paragraph, including the two paraphrased above and the 
one that follows them.
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