Rust API wrapping the ibverbs RDMA library.
libibverbs is a library that allows userspace processes to use RDMA "verbs" to perform
high-throughput, low-latency network operations for both Infiniband (according to the
Infiniband specifications) and iWarp (iWARP verbs specifications). It handles the control path
of creating, modifying, querying and destroying resources such as Protection Domains,
Completion Queues, Queue-Pairs, Shared Receive Queues, Address Handles, and Memory Regions. It
also handles sending and receiving data posted to QPs and SRQs, and getting completions from
CQs using polling and completions events.
A good place to start is to look at the programs in examples/, and the upstream
C examples. You can test RDMA programs on modern Linux kernels even without specialized RDMA
hardware by using SoftRoCE.
The control path is implemented through system calls to the uverbs kernel module, which
further calls the low-level HW driver. The data path is implemented through calls made to
low-level HW library which, in most cases, interacts directly with the HW provides kernel and
network stack bypass (saving context/mode switches) along with zero copy and an asynchronous
I/O model.
iWARP ethernet NICs support RDMA over hardware-offloaded TCP/IP, while InfiniBand is a general
high-throughput, low-latency networking technology. InfiniBand host channel adapters (HCAs) and
iWARP NICs commonly support direct hardware access from userspace (kernel bypass), and
libibverbs supports this when available.
For more information on RDMA verbs, see the InfiniBand Architecture Specification
vol. 1, especially chapter 11, and the RDMA Consortium's RDMA Protocol Verbs
Specification. See also the upstream libibverbs/verbs.h file for the original C
definitions, as well as the manpages for the ibv_* methods.
libibverbs is usually available as a free-standing library package. It used to be
self-contained, but has recently been adopted into rdma-core. cargo will automatically
build the necessary library files and place them in vendor/rdma-core/build/lib. If a
system-wide installation is not available, those library files can be used instead by copying
them to /usr/lib, or by adding that path to the dynamic linking search path.
All interfaces are Sync and Send since the underlying ibverbs API is thread safe.
Much of the documentation of this crate borrows heavily from the excellent posts over at RDMAmojo. If you are going to be working a lot with ibverbs, chances are you will want to head over there. In particular, this overview post may be a good place to start.