Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] [ATTEND] SR-IOV Management

[Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de>]

On 01/31/2012 08:02 PM, Chad Dupuis wrote:
> With more and more storage controller hardware supporting SR-IOV in
> next
> couple of years it seems to make sense at this point to discuss, from a
> storage stack perspective, managing how we instantiate and manage
> SR-IOV
> virtual functions (VFs).  Currently for hardware that does support
> SR-IOV,
> the management of that functionality is managed entirely by the
> hardware
> device driver.  However, a more dynamic management to how VFs are
> created
> and destroyed (assuming the hardware supports it) may be more desirable
> since the most common use case, assigning VFs to virtual guests, also
> tends to be very dynamic and fluid.  We also need to consider how VFs
> interact with complimentary technology such as NPIV in Fibre Channel.
> 
> I'd like to propose that we discuss the following issues to see if a
> consensus can be reached about how to deal with them:
> 
> * VF instantiation
> * VF/NPIV port pairing
> * Namespace management
> * LUN presentation
> 
Actually, SR-IOV on FC should be easy to handle; it maps quite
easily on NPIV (which probably was the intention :-).

However, for SAS things get really tricky, as we don't have virtual
SAS IDs. Some vendor was actually planning on doing ACLs in firmware
(shudder).

And then there is the pci-stub mess.

So yes, definitely something to discuss here.

Cheers,

Hannes
-- 
Dr. Hannes Reinecke		      zSeries & Storage
hare@suse.de			      +49 911 74053 688
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg
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