On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 11:18 -0400, Joe Landman wrote: > > Ashley Pittman wrote: > > >> More to the point, this dynamic binding allows you to write to the API, > >> present a consistent ABI, and handle the hardware details elsewhere in a > >> driver which can be linked in by the .so/.dll/.eieio method at runtime. > > > > That's exactly what I thought. I was thrown by your "This is a nice > > idea" comment because using Windows is no different to Linux in this > > respect. > > The major difference will be that Microsoft enforces its worldview here, > which in this particular point, will likely be more in line with what we > should see on Linux, but don't for a variety of reasons (see Greg L's > post on MPI ABI). We need it, we just haven't collectively decided that > there is enough pain to make this the general case yet. Microsoft > decided (correctly) that this was a good thing, and will just do it. > This will have a number of side effects, including making "porting" to > new hardware communication adapters MPI stacks a thing of the past, but > only on windows. Not on Linux.
I can almost see your argument here, currently there isn't a MPI ABI and you think that on Windows this situation might be different? The technical problems of making a stable, cross ISV ABI are the same on Linux and Windows (possibly even slightly worse under Windows), the only difference being that under Linux there is a large amount of inertia in keeping the status quo as moving to a consistent model would break at least somebodies applications, under a brave new Windows world that inertia isn't there so the ISV might as well mimic the ABI of somebody (in this case Microsoft) from day one. In practise I don't think this is going to be a step forward for two reasons, firstly the devil is in the detail so having two different code bases export the same ABI might work at the compile/link level but they would still behave subtlety differently at run-time, secondly windows is well known for it's DLL hell model, they can't even have maintain consistency between release so tracking it externally would be a very difficult (and error prone) thing to do. Ashley, _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
