open-iscsi porting for VMWare ESX

[Erez Zilber]

Hi,

Are there any plans (or even work in progress) for porting open-iscsi to
VMWare ESX? I know that it has a custom kernel which is a hybrid of
kernel 2.4 & 2.6. The interface with scsi-ml shouldn't be very different
from what we have in 2.6 (I know that other SCSI LLDs were easily ported
to that kernel).

Thanks,
--

____________________________________________________________

Erez Zilber | 972-9-971-7689

Software Engineer, Storage Team

Voltaire – _The Grid Backbone_

__

www.voltaire.com <http://www.voltaire.com/>

[Mike Christie]

Erez Zilber wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Are there any plans (or even work in progress) for porting open-iscsi to
> VMWare ESX? I know that it has a custom kernel which is a hybrid of
> kernel 2.4 & 2.6. The interface with scsi-ml shouldn't be very different
> from what we have in 2.6 (I know that other SCSI LLDs were easily ported
> to that kernel).
>

I do not have any plans. I am overworked fixing bugs in just the linux
version :)

Feel free to do it. As you know the userspace code was originally
written with portability in mind. When we started using sysfs we kind of
ignored that, but I have all the sysfs stuff in its own file now so that
could be abstracted away like the netlink/ioctl code.

Are you guys looking into this because you need to add iser support?
Didn't you guys have a code to work with SLES8/RHEL3? I think the
initiators in there and vmware are related one might be linux-iscsi-3.5
and the other is linux-iscsi-3.4. I do not remember the difference. It
may be major or may not.

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 10:36:52AM +0200, Erez Zilber wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Are there any plans (or even work in progress) for porting open-iscsi to
> VMWare ESX? I know that it has a custom kernel which is a hybrid of
> kernel 2.4 & 2.6. The interface with scsi-ml shouldn't be very different
> from what we have in 2.6 (I know that other SCSI LLDs were easily ported
> to that kernel).

Vmware uses a badly hacked 2.4 kernel with a big binary blob hooked into
it, giving a derived work of the linux kernel that's not legally
redistributable. I unfortunately don't have enough copyrights on that
particular version to sue them. I do object to use of any open-iscsi
code of my origin to be used with it, though.