Minutes of the PktWay-WG meeting, at IETF'39, Aug-1997 ====================================================== (Reported by Marc Fidler and Mark Littlefield) The PacketWay working group met at IETF'39 in Munich, Germany on Friday, August 15. The list of attendees is attached. Danny Cohen opened the meeting by asking all attendees introduce themselves and provide their background. Danny next presented an overview of PacketWay and the meeting agenda that included: Status of the documents) PktWay and SRVLOC Interoperability testing MPI over PktWay Thomas Narten (AD-INT) iterated the need to accelerate the work on the various documents, which are the expected delivery of the PktWay-WG. Thomas also provided much needed guidance about various aspects of the required work. A number of document action items were discussed. The PacketWay specification is now split into multiple documents: 1. EEP The goal is to finish editing the document by the end of the month and submit for proposed standard status by the end of September, including a two-weeks last-call period. The EEP handling of destination-designation (using Hoffman Coding) has to be better explained than the way it is in the current document. The EEP document will have a new section about address assignment, which will be a recommendation, not a part of the PktWay standard (just as IP address assignment is NOT a part of RFC0791). 2. The enumeration appendix will be removed into a separate document, to be eventually maintained by IANA. 3. RRP This document will be split into three documents: a. Basic RRP b. Capability handling c. Dynamic routing table exchange The enumeration appendix will be removed from the RRP document and a separate document created as mentioned above). The goal is to submit the RRP documents for proposed standard status by the December IETF meeting. Marc Fidler and Robert George suggested to add to the PktWay standard also a "compressed header" of 8B only. The consensus was that such a compressed PacketWay header should be proposed in a separate document (probably as a new version of the EEP). Robert George proposed a certain format for the "compressed header" which he will circulate soon via a message to the mailing list. The following milestones were judged by the working group as realistic: Aug-97 EEP interoperability demo (done, between MSU and LMMS) Sep-97 Submit the updated EEP Internet-Draft as a Proposed-Standard Sep-97 Submit the RRP specification as an Internet-Draft Oct-97 Demo test interoperability of the RRP Nov-97 Submit the updated RRP as a Proposed-Standard Dec-97 (IETF-DC) Submit initial specification of the PktWay REDAP (Resource Discovery and Allocation Protocol) as an Internet-Draft Mar-98 Demo the PktWay REDAP Apr-98 Submit the updated REDAP as a Proposed-Standard Danny reported about the differences between SRVLOC and the way PktWay handles CAPAbilities. In spite of the differences, some coordination is planned between the two working groups. PktWay will add to its capabilities a SRVLOC-server, and some effort will be made to unify the capabilities code. Danny will work on it with Erik Guttman of SUN, the co-chair of the SRVLOC-WG. Robert George gave a presentation on PacketWay interoperability testing between Mississippi State University and Sanders. Successful testing of level A (EEP) fields was outlined. The implementations of MSU and LMMS not only were independent, but also use different computing models, as MSU maximizes the share of the host in implementing PktWay, whereas LMMS minimizes it, pushing tasks to the network interface processors. This test covered most of the EEP features, but not all. Among the features that were not tested yet are the endianness field, padding length, symbols, and priority. The interoperability test was very successful. Robert then presented a specific proposal for a compressed PktWay header. The header was 8 bytes in length as opposed to the 16 byte EEP header. It was requested that this header be sent to the PacketWay reflector to solicit comments from interested parties. Robert also mentioned that the working group plans to commence RRP interoperability testing by October. Since Robert already described the interoperability tests conducted with LMMS, Marc Fidler (of LMMS) did not deliver the presentation that he prepared of the same tests. Marc reiterated the need to clean up the PktWay documents. Shane Hebert gave a presentation dealing with the commercial need for PacketWay. He detailed MPI-Software-Technology's desire for PacketWay, along with the value of an IETF standardization for PacketWay. In summary, Danny reiterated the need to push the EEP document through editing, while, in the process, work on the RRP documents. All were encouraged to use the mailing list (the "PktWay-reflector"). Danny thought that something was broken with the current reflector. He apologized for it, and promised to get it fixed soon. ******************************************************************************