A Question about iSCSI boot

[Lee Duncan]

Hi:

I am trying to better understand iSCSI boot. Towards that end, I'm trying to understand how, during iSCSI boot, the system gets the interface attributes.

In my case, I am using a QLogic 8262 CNA card in my server. When the system comes up, I run "iscsiadm -m fw", and I get "iscsiadm: Could not get list of targets from firmware. (err 21)".

I'm running on SLES 11 SP2, with a 3.1.0-1.2 kernel. Iscsiadm says the version is 2.0-872.suse.

An "ls mod | fgrep iscsi" return:

iscsi_boot_sysfs 16000 0
iscsi_tcp 18534 1
libiscsi_tcp 29211 1 iscsi_tcp
libiscsi 57546 2 iscsi_tcp,libiscsi_tcp
scsi_transport_iscsi 50417 4 qla4xxx,iscsi_tcp,libiscsi
iscsi_trgt 117284 5

My adapter is not yet connected to any target -- it doesn't even have a Phy installed yet. But I thought I should still see interface attributes, such as iface.initiatorname.

Thanks for any help you can supply.
--
Lee Duncan

[Mike Christie]

On 04/25/2012 08:39 PM, Lee Duncan wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I am trying to better understand iSCSI boot. Towards that end, I'm trying to understand how, during iSCSI boot, the system gets the interface attributes.
>
> In my case, I am using a QLogic 8262 CNA card in my server. When the system comes up, I run "iscsiadm -m fw", and I get "iscsiadm: Could not get list of targets from firmware. (err 21)".
>
> I'm running on SLES 11 SP2, with a 3.1.0-1.2 kernel. Iscsiadm says the version is 2.0-872.suse.
>

I am not sure what is in SLES kernels. The qla drivers you are using
might not support iscsi_boot_sysfs (this displays boot info in a
iscsi_boot dir in /sys/firmware). If it does then I think it would
normally have it listed in lsmod as one of the modules using it.

If you do

modinfo qla4xxx

does your qla4xxx driver have a "ql4xdisablesysfsboot" modparam? If not
then iscsi boot using iscsiadm is not supported. If you do have that
param then you need it to be 1.

> An "ls mod | fgrep iscsi" return:
>
> iscsi_boot_sysfs 16000 0
> iscsi_tcp 18534 1
> libiscsi_tcp 29211 1 iscsi_tcp
> libiscsi 57546 2 iscsi_tcp,libiscsi_tcp
> scsi_transport_iscsi 50417 4 qla4xxx,iscsi_tcp,libiscsi
> iscsi_trgt 117284 5
>
> My adapter is not yet connected to any target -- it doesn't even have a Phy installed yet. But I thought I should still see interface attributes, such as iface.initiatorname.

I think you need to have the boot targets configured.
qla4xxx_get_boot_info looks like it only exports boot info if that is done.

Info like the intiatorname that the card is setup with would be
displayed in a command like "iscsiadm -m host P 1". that command is more
generic.

[Mark Lehrer]

> I am trying to better understand iSCSI boot. Towards that end, I'm
> trying to understand how, during iSCSI boot, the system gets the
> interface attributes.

Of course this will depend on what hardware & driver you use.

I had an email exchange with Qlogic a few months ago about their driver
situation (for the 4062C anyway). IIRC the driver that is in the standard
Linus kernel didn't fully integrage with iscsiadm (or SAN surfer) as well as
the one that you can download from their site. I thought it would at least
let iscsiadm show the session info though.

I believe they were trying to get the fully functional version into the
vanilla kernel for RH 6.2; but I haven't yet tried it out.

Mark

[Mike Christie]

On 04/28/2012 11:26 PM, Mark Lehrer wrote:
>> I am trying to better understand iSCSI boot. Towards that end, I'm
>> trying to understand how, during iSCSI boot, the system gets the
>> interface attributes.
>
> Of course this will depend on what hardware & driver you use.
>
> I had an email exchange with Qlogic a few months ago about their driver
> situation (for the 4062C anyway). IIRC the driver that is in the
> standard Linus kernel didn't fully integrage with iscsiadm (or SAN
> surfer) as well as the one that you can download from their site. I
> thought it would at least let iscsiadm show the session info though.

The qla4xxx driver in Linus's tree now supports open-iscsi (the
open-iscsi tools in the open-iscsi git tree). So the next open-iscsi.org
release will support qla4xxx. You can setup the networking, do discovery
and login to targets like you do with software iscsi.

I think the iscsi iface networking setup is still a little awkward for
qla4xxx/be2iscsi, so I have been trying to fix that up before doing a
release. Also I am waiting on some testing.

But the current iscsiadm should at least show the qla4xxx sessions in
older kernels.

>
> I believe they were trying to get the fully functional version into the
> vanilla kernel for RH 6.2; but I haven't yet tried it out.
>

The iscsiadm and qla4xxx in RHEL 6.2 should work together. Qlogic and I
backported open-iscsi.org code and kernel.org kernel code to the RHEL
kernel and iscsi tools in 6.2.