On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:36 PM, Dan Maslowski <[email protected]> wrote: > Daniel Carosone wrote: >> >> How much effort would be involved in enabling comstar to present firewire >> disk targets? (or, for that matter, usb targets) >> >> Are there any efforts currently in this direction? Volunteers to take it >> up? :-) >> >> This would open up many interesting possibilities to bring opensolaris and >> zfs to the embedded storage space, given the widespread (almost ubiquitous) >> availability of these interfaces. >> > > COMSTAR and ZFS are already in the embedded storage space. For USB, target > is a function of a physical cable (which end you are on designates host vs > initiator), so not really possible, even if it were interesting unless you > did some serious spoofing and unnatural things (at least I think so). > Firewire is perhaps possible, but I don't know enough about firewire to > know. All that being said, we have at least three port providers that are > samples and should be relatively easy to use as a baseline... I just don't > know how interesting it would be to the consumer space. The only reason I > can think of would be cost, and, I just don't see the relevance of COMSTAR > and ZFS for a music player or other consumer electronic device.
It's perfectly possible for Firewire--all recent Macs with Firewire can boot into FW target mode, where they export their drives over FW. I don't believe they're using anything special, chipset-wise--it's just a bit of embedded software. Personally, I'd *love* to have a Firewire target in Solaris. It'd be great to be able to carve off a slice of my big zpool and use it for temporary *bootable* block storage with my Macs, all for the cost of a $20 PCI FW card. Scott _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
