Re: [PATCH][RFC 21/23]: iSCSI target driver

From: Vladislav Bolkhovitin
Date: Fri Dec 12 2008 - 14:26:24 EST


Nicholas A. Bellinger wrote:
On Wed, 2008-12-10 at 22:01 +0300, Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote:
This patch contains iSCSI-SCST target driver. This driver is a heavily modified forked with all respects IET (http://iscsitarget.sourceforge.net). Modifications were aimed to make a clearer, more reviewable and maintainable code as well as to fix many problems and make many improvements. See http://scst.sourceforge.net/target_iscsi.html for more details.

It has split user/kernel space architecture, where all management, sessions creation, parameters negotiation, etc. made in user space and data are transferred in the kernel space. Such architecture for iSCSI processing was many times acknowledged as the right one. Particularly, in-kernel iSCSI initiator (open-iscsi) has such architecture.


Just as with the Open/iSCSI Initiator, IMHO I believe the split
architecture design is difficult both to improve, debug and maintain,
and provides *ZERO* additional benefit in the context of traditional
iSCSI target mode for doing login and connection/session setup in
userspace.

Also, I appericate that you spent alot of time porting over IET code to
your engine, but during our previous discussion you did not seem
terribly interested in validation against core-iscsi-dv
(http://linux-iscsi.org/index.php/Core-iscsi-dv) to test RFC-3720
interopt and stability. Because the Core-iSCSI Initiator supports every
possible parameter combination up to ErrorRecoveryLevel=0 defined in
RFC-3720, the Core-iSCSI-Dv tests can run badblocks (or any too) to
check data integrity for *EVERY* possible traditional iSCSI key
combination and functionality for your iSCSI-SCST work, and any type of
serious iSCSI-SCST production deployments.

The fact that nobody so far cared to do all those complicated and time consuming rather academic tests doesn't mean that iSCSI-SCST won't pass them. IET/iSCSI-SCST have been used for a long time in very different setups, including xBSD and Solaris initiators on non-x86 architectures, without any problems.

Vlad

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/