IBACM(7)

💖 IBACM — InfiniBand communication management assistant 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the ibacm(7) page and it's literally the user guide for the IB ACM 🦋 (that's the InfiniBand communication management assistant, in case the acronym was giving cryptic). It lives in the 7 section of the manual, so it's one of those "big picture concepts" pages, not a "type this command" page. iykyk 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

#include <infiniband/acm.h>

like, that's it. that's the whole synopsis. you just include the header and the vibes are immaculate 🌸

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So what does this thing do, you ask? It's used to resolve remote endpoint information before establishing communications over InfiniBand. That's the whole job description. no cap. 💜

🌟 NOTES 🌟

okay here's the tea, and there's a lot of it, so sit down 🍓

The IB ACM provides scalable address and route resolution services over InfiniBand. It takes your system network names and IP addresses and resolves them into InfiniBand path record data, using efficient mechanisms — including caching of data — because doing the same lookup twice is not the move, periodt.

Now, important boundary check 🔥: the IB ACM provides the information you need to establish a connection, but it does not implement the communication management protocol. It's giving helpful bestie, not main character. It provides services similar to rdma_getaddrinfo, rdma_resolve_addr, and rdma_resolve_route using IB multicast.

Also, and this is lowkey iconic: the IB ACM does not require IPoIB and does not use standard naming services, such as DNS. It also limits network communication, especially with the IB SA. So it's the "quiet efficient friend who doesn't blow up the group chat" of resolution services 🙈

There's a utility, ib_acme, that assists in verifying what options of the ibacm service may be usable for the current fabric topology. highly recommend checking it out, fr fr 🧚

And how do clients talk to the ibacm service? Client interactions are done over sockets through a standard TCP connection. The librdmacm abstracts this interaction, so you don't have to deal with the socket plumbing yourself 💅

⭐ RETURN CODES ⭐

short and sweet, just how we like it:

• == 0 — success 🎉
• != 0 — error 😭

🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

go read these next, bestie:

• ib_acme(1)
• ibacm(8)

and that's the whole page, you ate it up 👑

this was brought to you by IBACM, dated 2014-06-16, in the IBACM(7) era — a certified classic, no notes 💖✨🎀