Re: [Iscsitarget-devel] 10 Gig Ethernet for iSCSI target?

[FUJITA T. <to...@ac...>]

From: Mirko Benz <mir...@we...>
Subject: Re: [Iscsitarget-devel] 10 Gig Ethernet for iSCSI target?
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 10:07:34 +0100

> Have you used the chelsio boards in offload mode?

Do you mean offload mode for TCP offload mode? If so, the answer is
yes.

If you refer to iSCSI offload mode, the answer is no. When I tried
Chelsio several months ago, the iSCSI offload mode driver seemed to be
broken.


> Are there any modifications necessary or does it work out of the box
> with open-iscsi and iet as a TOE?

Its depends on TOE implementations. TOE NIC drivers modify the linux
network stack. open-iscsi and IET directly use some functions in the
network stack. So possibly, you need to modify the code with some TOE
NICs.

When I tried Chelsio, open-iscsi, and IET, they worked without
modifications.


> Do you expect a significant performance advantage when using iSCSI 
> hardware support features of the chelsio card?

I have not done accurate performance tests with iSCSI software
solutions with iSCSI hardware support (like the comparison between
Chelsio TOE mode and Chelsio TOE and iSCSI offload mode), so I'm not
sure.

Some guys that have tried several software and hardware iSCSI target
solutions told me that software iSCSI target solutions are not
scalable (that is, cannot produce good performance with lots of
initiators).