Chapter 3. QP: Message Transfer Mechanism

The Previous Chapter

The previous chapter introduced the concept of device attributes, managers, management agents (MAs), and management datagrams (MADs).

This Chapter

This 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.

The Next Chapter

The next chapter provides an introduction to the four IBA transport service types (RC, UC, RD, and UD QPs), as well as the two non-IBA transport service types (Raw IPv6 and Raw EtherType QPs) that permit packets associated with virtually any other network protocol to be tunneled through an IBA network encapsulated in “raw” IBA packets.