Re: Ang: Re: [Stgt-devel] Re: [Iscsitarget-devel] stgt a new version of iscsi target?

[Mike Christie <michaelc@cs.wisc.edu>]

Dave C Boutcher wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 02:09:32PM -0600, Mike Christie wrote:
> 
>>James Bottomley wrote:
>>
>>>On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 13:10 -0600, Mike Christie wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>cleanup. In the end some of the scsi people liked the idea of throwing 
>>>>the non-read/write command to userspace and to do this we just decided 
>>>>to start over but I have been cutting and pasting your code and cleaning 
>>>>it up as I add more stuff.
>>>
>>>
>>>To be honest, I'd like to see all command processing at user level
>>>(including read/write ... for block devices, it shouldn't be that
>>>inefficient, since you're merely going to say remap an area from one
>>>device to another; as long as no data transformation ever occurs, the
>>>user never touches the data and it all remains in the kernel page
>>>cache).
>>
>>Ok, Tomo and I briefly talked about this when we saw Jeff's post about 
>>doing block layer drivers in userspace on lkml. I think we were somewhat 
>>prepared for this given some of your other replies.
>>
>>So Vlad and other target guys what do you think? Vlad are you going to 
>>continue to maintain scst as kernel only, or is there some place we can 
>>work together on this on - if your feelings are not hurt too much that 
>>is :) ?
> 
> 
> Oofff....Architecturally I agree with James...do all command processing
> in one place.  On the other hand, the processing involved with a read or
> write in the normal case (no aborts/resets/ordering/timeouts/etc) is
> almost zero.  Figure out the LBA and length and pass on the I/O.  The

There is still memory and scatterlist allocations. If we are not going 
to allocate all the memory for a command buffer and request with 
GFP_ATOMIC (and can then run from the the HW interrupt or soft irq) we 
have to pass that on to a thread. I guess there is disagreement whether 
that part is a feature or bad use of GFP_ATOMIC though so... But I just 
mean to say there could be a little more to do.