Chapter 2. Intro to Attributes and Managers

The Previous Chapter

The previous chapter provided:

• An introduction to basic terminology.

• Packet addressing basics.

• The basic roles of channel adapters, routers, switches, and repeaters.

• An introduction to message passing.

This Chapter

This chapter introduces the concept of device attributes, managers, management agents (MAs), and management datagrams (MADs).

The Next Chapter

The next chapter introduces the concept of the Queue Pair (QP), the message transfer engine that lies at the heart of the IBA technology. Request and response packets, Packet Sequence Numbers (PSNs), and the Verb Layer (a quasi-API used to control an IBA HCA) are introduced. The four IBA QP types are introduced and the concept of the QP Context and its contents are defined. Finally, there is a rather detailed example of a message transfer from one CA to another.