Implementation and Design Questions

• What's the right abstraction of this Homa library?
  • Message oriented vs RPC oriented? [Start with RPC - i.e. what RAMCloud has now]
  • Integrated poller or exported poller? [Allow use of application provided polling thread]
  • Sessions and sockets? [Revisit - Unclear that sessions are necessary]
  • How to handle memory lifetimes of message buffers? Copy contents? [Revisit - Use existing?]
• How do we provide configuration information?
  • File?
  • Constructor args?
• If the interface is not what we want how should we proceed? [Use mostly existing interface]
  • Start by shimming around the existing code?
  • Try to modify the interface as we go?
• Build tools? Make vs CMake vs Other
• Are the drivers included in the library? [Drivers should be external]
• Split protocol processing from message assembly
  • Scheduling packets is a relatively centralized activity, but
  • Assembling packets into messages can be done in a data parallel manner.