Re: Integration of SCST in the mainstream Linux kernel

Matt Mackall
2008-02-05T00:46:32Z

On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 16:24 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Matt Mackall wrote:
> >
> > But ATAoE is boring because it's not IP. Which means no routing,
> > firewalls, tunnels, congestion control, etc.
>
> The thing is, that's often an advantage. Not just for performance.
>
> > NBD and iSCSI (for all its hideous growths) can take advantage of these
> > things.
>
> .. and all this could equally well be done by a simple bridging protocol
> (completely independently of any AoE code).
>
> The thing is, iSCSI does things at the wrong level. It *forces* people to
> use the complex protocols, when it's a known that a lot of people don't
> want it.

I frankly think NBD is at a pretty comfortable level. It's internally
very simple (and hardware-agnostic). And moderately easy to do in
silicon.

But I'm not going to defend iSCSI. I worked on the first implementation
(what became the Cisco iSCSI driver) and I have no love for iSCSI at
all. It should have been (and started out as) a nearly trivial
encapsulation of SCSI over TCP much like ATA over Ethernet but quickly
lost the plot when committees got ahold of it.

--
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.