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Date:      Wed, 29 Nov 2000 11:43:29 -0800 (PST)
From:      Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
To:        Nat Lanza <magus@cs.cmu.edu>
Cc:        Tom Samplonius <tom@sdf.com>, Chuck McCrobie <mccrobi@aplcenMP.apl.jhu.edu>, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: RFC 2143 (IP over SCSI) Support in FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.21.0011291140160.1337-100000@zeppo.feral.com>
In-Reply-To: <uocsnoh1bei.fsf@hurlame.pdl.cs.cmu.edu>

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On 24 Nov 2000, Nat Lanza wrote:

> Tom Samplonius <tom@sdf.com> writes:
> 
> > Is there planned support for SCSI over IP?  I've just seen a storage
> > server that uses SCSI over IP.  The reasoning is that gigabit ethernet is
> > just as fast as fibrechannel, and much more standard.  They have drivers
> > for Linux and NT, and have announced that a driver will be released for
> > FreeBSD in early 2001?  Apparently the driver simply probes the LAN for
> > SCSI devices and attaches each discovered storage server as a LUN.  For
> > some reason the name of this product escapes me.
> 
> Please keep in mind that SCSI-over-IP is currently the topic of an
> active IETF working group, and the protocol development is not
> finished. It would probably be best to wait for the standard to
> actually be finalized before adding support, since having support that
> doesn't interoperate is not much better than having no support. The
> current timeline has the standard proposal being submitted next May.

Yes and no. The ANSI SCSI-2 spec took years to finalize. Same for SCSI-3. If
it's a worthwhile feature, and you're dealing just with the software
instantiation, it might be worth looking at doing for early releases.

If you're burning silicon, hmm, that'd be questionable.


> 
> If you're interested in following the progress of the standard, the IP
> Storage working group's charter is here: 
> 
> http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ips-charter.html
> 
> Additionally, there is a public mailing list archived here:
> 
> http://ips.pdl.cs.cmu.edu/mail/maillist.html
> 
> Subscription information for the list is available on the charter
> page.
> 
> 
> Our lab is working on SCSI-over-IP, and our target platforms are FreeBSD
> and Linux. We would most likely be interested in contributing our code to
> the FreeBSD community when we're done, but it's far too early to make any
> promises.

Can you keep us posted on this? We'd absolutely love it if CMU (d'ya work with
Garth?) did this.

> 
> Also, discussion at the SCSI panel at BSDCon indicated that the
> FreeBSD SCSI developers are certainly interested in providing a
> framework in which SCSI-over-IP can be supported well. Our initial
> results show that it's possible to build a system with decent
> performance over 100bT and gigabit links without any modifications to
> the OS -- the driver builds as a self-contained KLD, and acts much
> like any other SCSI HBA driver.

Ah. Cool. Is this available to be looked at? Define 'decent'...

-matt




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