Re: [RFC v2 PATCH 0/19] A kernel-level configfs enabled generic targetengine for Linux v2.6.32

From: Vladislav Bolkhovitin
Date: Mon Sep 21 2009 - 08:04:28 EST


Nicholas A. Bellinger, on 09/19/2009 02:07 AM wrote:
Greetings all,

This is the second round of request for comments for TCM/ConfigFS v3.2 from lio-core-2.6.git.
Thanks to the folks who made comments, and I again invite people to take a look and make
recommendations on how the code can be futher improved to use the best available upstream
interfaces.

Also, the standalone patches for TCM v3.2 are now available from:

http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/nab/target_core_mod-patches/

The first posting from 09112009 can be found here:

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=125272088024636

The changelog since the posting on 09112009, which can be found here:

*) Convert to struct mutex for struct sempahore initialized with init_MUTEX() (mentioned by Daniel Walker)
*) Convert to struct completion for struct semaphore initialized with init_MUTEX_LOCKED() (mentioned by Daniel Walker)
*) Convert to use Kbuild instead of Makefile for drivers/target/ (mentioned by Boaz Harrosh)
*) Use include/asm-generic/div64.h for unsigned long long division on 32-bit architectures
*) Use include/linux/math64.h for unsigned long long modulo on 32-bit architectures

The lio-core-2.6.git tree can be found here:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/nab/lio-core-2.6.git;a=summary

More Information about Target_Core_Mod/ConfigFS, and PR and ALUA:

http://www.linux-iscsi.org/index.php/Target_Core_Mod/ConfigFS
http://www.linux-iscsi.org/index.php/Persistent_Reservations
http://www.linux-iscsi.org/index.php/ALUA

The complete v3.x TCM CLI operations set can be found here:

http://www.linux-iscsi.org/index.php/Lio-utils#v3.1_TCM_CLI_operations

Instructions and examples for getting setup:

http://www.linux-iscsi.org/builds/docs/LIO-3.0-Users_Reference_Manual.pdf
http://www.linux-iscsi.org/index.php/Howto#Start_target_core_mod

Nicholas,

In the previous iteration of this patchset I asked you some essential questions about what advantages TCM has over STGT which can't be implemented in STGT and can justify the move from it to TCM, as well as how did you test TCM to claim that TCM is generic and, hence, can work with hardware target adapters (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/9/15/315). There was no reply answering those questions, instead you keep pushing your patches. (In fact, I received privately even 2 very emotional and offensive replies from Nicholas Bellinger.)

So, since there is no reply, I didn't miss anything and there are no points to justify the move from STGT to TCM, and TCM is "generic" only for software iSCSI targets.

For sake of completeness, I should also mention that the move from STGT to TCM is not a move forward, it's a move backward, because TCM doesn't allow creation of backend and target drivers in user space.

Hopefully, somebody more authoritative than I will ask you to stop pushing your patches until you address the above questions.

Vlad
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