2011/12/20 Or Gerlitz <[email protected]>:
>
> Beep(2), so your system has distro which is based on kernel 2.6.32 and iscsi
> initiator tools version 2.0.871 and per your needs, you've booted it with
> kernel 3.0 .
>
> At this point should you have stop and make sure that this combo works,
> iscsi wise (simpler to test iscsi/tcp... no need in rdma knowledge), did you
> do this validation?

Yes, of cause I did - TCP worked very well. I've also updated from git
to latest 2.0.872 (latest change 2011-11-01) for testing. TCP always
worked and iSER was always unusable.

>
> If this combo isn't working, you have to update the iscsi tools to a version
> which supports your kernel.
>

Yes, I even took the max. 2.6.35 supported kernel stuff from
open-iscsi git and have changed the Makefile to make it compile
against my kernel. With that I ensured that open-iscsi kernel code and
user-space match. TCP O.K. - no iSER with that!

> If this combo is working iscsi/tcp wise but not ib_iser wise, its seems to
> be a bug, and I'd be happy to help with finding the root cause, etc.

Have you ever developed/tested the ib_iser module for/with > 2.6.30
kernels? I've seen that there were lots of changes in the whole
open-iscsi kernel stack between 2.6.30 and 2.6.32. The whole ABI has
changed in libiscsi. They added stuff e.g. at the first position in
enums. If ib_iser isn't aware of such changes lots of crap can happen.
...and happened to me while testing by the way.

>
> But this way or another, OFA isn't an iscsi tools factory, nor have anyone
> that can/want to support iscsi tools, we (folks from the rdma vendors
> community that deal with iscsi) are working with the upstream iscsi
> maintainer to address iscsi issues. The fact that OFA ships iscsi code
> except for ib_iser/cxgb4i/etc modules is a bug, BTW, I'll act to change
> that.
>

ib_iser has tight dependencies to open-iscsi code (see attached). In
my opinion an ib_iser developer should work that tight together with
the open-iscsi guys. They should inform you about all ABI and API
changes in libiscsi so that you can react on that. As an user of
IB/iSER it is really confusing that this isn't the case and that OFA
only provides 2.6.30 based open-iscsi stuff which only works for iSER
due to missing libiscsi_tcp in there. At least this could be fixed
easily.

Now I know why everybody has his own OFED - so do we now. E.g. the
QLogic stuff isn't even compilable without the QLogic OFED, because
they only put their patches in there. Luckily, we have only Mellanox
HCAs in our productive environment.

Would it help, if we provide our patches for open-iscsi and IB/iSER >
2.6.32 to bring that into mainline OFED?

Sebastian

<<attachment: open-iscsi.png>>

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