Brian J. Murrell wrote: > I have run into a conflict trying to build a matching kernel and > kernel-ib pair for OFED 1.3 and RHEL5's 2.6.18 kernel (although I > suspect this will apply to generally any kernel of the same vintage). >
General comment - in the future, I suggest that you send OFED related e-mails also to the EWG list and to me (I maintain iSER in OFED & kernel.org). > The problem is that OFED 1.3 appears to include/provide some iSCSI > support, such as drivers/scsi/scsi_transport_iscsi.c for one example > which is the "SCSI_ISCSI_ATTRS" kernel attribute. The 2.6.18 RHEL5 > kernel can provide the same capability if one decides to configure it > into the kernel build. > OFED 1.3 provides open-iscsi 2.0-865.15 (userspace & kernel). This version is newer than the version that is shipped with RHEL5. It also has full iSER support. > So the question arises, do I want to have the kernel provide it or have > kernel-ib provide it. It's not quite that easy though. > > If I disable it in the kernel, I also disable dependent drivers such as > SCSI_QLA_ISCSI (QLogic ISP4XXX host adapter family support). In order > to disable it in the kernel-ib build I need to disable "iser" support > with "--without-iser-mod", which seems a bit like throwing the baby out > with the bathwater. > Yeah, it is an open-iscsi transport, so you must have open-iscsi in order to use this driver. With OFED 1.3, qla4xxx is not included. We only included the TCP & iSER transports. > The reason I need to disable this in one place or another is that if my > kernel RPM is providing scsi_transport_iscsi.ko and so is kernel-ib, I > get an RPM conflict as the two files are in the same location in > the /lib/modules/$(uname -r) tree. > Of course. You can't have open-iscsi modules twice. > So how to resolve? I don't think it can be resolved easily currently. > I think the ofa_kernel build system needs to be more intelligent about > what's selected in the kernel and not providing duplicate capabilities. > IOW, I should be able to select CONFIG_SCSI_ISCSI_ATTRS=m in my > kernel .config and CONFIG_INFINIBAND_ISER=m in my ofa_kernel > configuration and ofa_kernel should figure out if it needs to provide > SCSI_ISCSI_ATTRS (i.e. build scsi_transport_iscsi.ko) or whether the > kernel is configured to and will be providing it. > OFED is shipped with its own version of open-iscsi because I don't want to support multiple versions of open-iscsi (each distro has its own version of open-iscsi). Also, having a newer version of open-iscsi (which we have in OFED) fixes many bugs and adds new features (which is good). Is qla4xxx the only problem that you have with open-iscsi in OFED? Erez _______________________________________________ general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openfabrics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/general To unsubscribe, please visit http://openib.org/mailman/listinfo/openib-general
