All,
For the past several months, Emulex has been updating our driver to support
the N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). We have reached a maturity point
where we would like to move the NPIV support into our upstream driver.
The patches, as an RFC, were posted 5/1 for review:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-scsi&m=117798737903334&w=2
This post formally requests inclusion of the NPIV modifications.
NPIV is a mechanism by which a FC port can acquire more than 1 Address
on a FC fabric. Using this mechanism, virtual FC ports can be instantiated
on the same physical Port. Each NPIV instance is a unique WWPN and
N_Port ID on the fabric. For all intents, it is another hba on the fabric.
Each instance has its own view of what is present on the fabric, each has
its own discovery engine, and each NPIV instances has a separate and unique
login context with each remote port.
In order to support NPIV, there were 3 major blocks of changes made to
the driver:
- First, the driver is reorganized to separate the handling of the
adapter from the handling of the FC port. Adapter handling includes
submissions of command requests, receiving responses, and managing
adapter resources. The FC port includes the discovery engine, login
handling, and the mapping of a Scsi_Host on the "port". Although
not a large functional change, as it touches core structures and
functions, resulting in a large text delta.
- Second, NPIV support is only available via new adapter interface
extensions, termed SLI-3. This interface changes some of the basic
behaviors such as command and response ring element sizes and data
structures, as well as a change in buffer posting. Note: the new
firmware extensions are found only on our mid-range and enterprise
4Gig adapters - so NPIV support is available only on these newer
adapters. The latest firmware can be downloaded from the Emulex
support page.
- Lastly, NPIV support is added to the driver. It utilizes the
interfaces of the fc transport for the creation and deletion of
vports. Within the driver, a new Scsi_Host is created for each
NPIV instance, and is paired with a new instance of a FC port.
This allows N FC Port elements to share a single Adapter.
Beyond the original 3 patches above, posted in the RFC, this patch set
includes the following:
- A rather large set of miscellaneous bug fixes found during further
testing and qualification.
- A patch to include support for the data buffer accessors. This is
a rework of the original patch by Fujita Tomonori:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-scsi&m=117896446832171&w=2
- A patch to up the revision to 8.2.1
There are 6 patches in total.
Given that the patch sets are rather large, I have placed them on
our lpfc page on SourceForge. See:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=103050&package_id=188761&release_id=513811
The patches are labeled and numbered per the descriptions above. They
apply on top of the current lpfc driver in scsi-misc-2.6 (the 8.1.12 driver).
SourceForge also includes a final tarball of the resulting driver.
Thank You
-- james s
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