On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 8:00 PM, James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Mon, 2009-08-31 at 10:28 -0700, Alok Kataria wrote: > > VMware PVSCSI driver - v2. > > OK, so the first thing that springs to mind is that we already have one > of these things: the ibmvscsi ... is there no way we can share code > between this and the other PV drivers? Good question. But shouldn't the ibmvscsi driver be refactored before considering sharing ibmvscsi code with other paravirtualized drivers ? A quote from the ibmvscsi.c source code: * TODO: This is currently pretty tied to the IBM i/pSeries hypervisor * interfaces. It would be really nice to abstract this above an RDMA * layer. Splitting the ibmvscsi.c driver in an SRP initiator and an RDMA driver would make the following possible: - Reuse the existing SRP initiator (ib_srp). Currently there are two SRP initiators present in the Linux kernel -- one that uses the RDMA verbs API (ib_srp) and one that only works with IBM's i/pSeries hypervisor (ibmvscsi). - Reuse the ib_ipoib kernel module to provide an IP stack on top of the new RDMA driver instead of having to maintain a separate network driver for this hardware (ibmveth). More information about the architecture the ibmvscsi and the ibmveth drivers have been developed for can be found in the following paper: D. Boutcher and D. Engebretsen, Linux Virtualization on IBM POWER5 Systems, Proceedings of the Linux Symposium, Vol. 1, July 2004, pp. 113-120 (http://www.kernel.org/doc/mirror/ols2004v1.pdf). Bart. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
