[Stgt-devel] Question for pass-through target design

[FUJITA Tomonori]

From: Douglas Gilbert <dougg at torque.net>
Subject: Re: [Stgt-devel] Question for pass-through target design
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 13:52:54 -0400

> FUJITA Tomonori wrote:
> > From: Robert Jennings <rcj at linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> > Subject: [Stgt-devel] Question for pass-through target design
> > Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 11:07:12 -0500
> > 
> >> It looks like the pass-through target support is currently broken, at
> >> least as I've checked for ibmvstgt, but I think it's a general problem.
> >> I wanted to check my assumptions and get ideas.
> > 
> > Yeah, unfortunately, it works only with the iSCSI target driver (which
> > runs in user space).
> > 
> > 
> >> The code isn't allocating any memory to pass along to the sg code to store
> >> the result of a read or data for a write.  Currently, dxferp for sg_io_hdr
> >> or dout_xferp/din_xferp for sg_io_v4 are assigned to the value of uaddr,
> >> which is set to 0 in kern_queue_cmd.  With the pointer set to NULL,
> >> the pass-through target isn't going to function.  Even if we had memory
> >> allocated, there isn't a means of getting data to be written via sg down
> >> this code path.
> >>
> >> What ideas are there as to how the data will get to user-space so that
> >> we can use sg?
> > 
> > For kernel-space drivers, we don't need to go to user-space. We can do
> > the pass-through in kernel space. I talked with James about this last
> > year and he said that if the code is implemented cleanly, he would
> > merges it into mainline.
> 
> We already have a pass-through in the kernel space for
> kernel space drivers. It is the scsi_tgt* code.

Could you elaborate more?

What I meant that is that the kernel tgt code (scsi_tgt*) receives
SCSI commands from one lld and send them to another lld instead of
sending them to user space.