Comment by areoform

6 hours ago

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3205-l...

MacOS has supported RDMA over thunderbolt since March 19th.

10 comments

areoform

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wrs  6 hours ago

That is just RDMA itself and seems to be aimed directly at distributed inference (no surprise there!). Now they need to update the SMB driver to make use of it.

  • geerlingguy  5 hours ago

    Yeah, raw RDMA is one thing, making sure other protocols can use it is another... hopefully Apple gets there, but right now SMB with RDMA is probably a tiny, tiny niche.

    I do wonder what Apple's custom-built servers are running for networking. I wish they still made Mac Pro-level chassis specifically for better IO. Thunderbolt 5 is nice, but far inferior to a PCIe x16 slot (which can hit 400 Gbps networking) nowadays.

    • xp84  3 hours ago

      I'd suspect that (from Apple's perspective) any form of file sharing (other than iCloud) is now considered 'extremely niche.'

      If they were focused on the needs of the kind of person who moves enough terabytes of files around to need this kind of speed, we'd see them still making either computers with slots, or first-party 25Gbps networking.

      I'm not really trying to criticize them for it -- Tim Cook's bean counters clearly did the math and they're certainly free to optimize their Mac R&D spend for things that'll sell college students MacBook Neos and Airs, rather than worrying about the MKBHDs, Linus Sebastians and Jeff Geerlings of the world (this is just a list of people I've seen using extremely fast networking).

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dlcarrier  6 hours ago

Is RDMA something worth looking into for connecting two random Linux computers? I've been extremely underwhelmed by the stability and performance of my NFS shares.

  • olavgg  5 hours ago

    Yes, nfs with rdma will increase your performance significantly.

    • gorkish  5 hours ago

      If your storage devices are native PCIe and your network is actually fast enough and your nics and switches have the proper hardware and driver support and your switches are properly configured and your nfs client and server configurations are tweaked just so, and you hold your face in just the right position

      The perf is amazing

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