On 02/13/2012 02:40 PM, Nicholas A. Bellinger wrote:
Hi Dor, James& Co,
On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 09:57 +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
On 02/13/2012 09:05 AM, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
On 12/02/12 21:16, James Bottomley wrote:
Well, no-one's yet answered the question I had about why.
Just to give one example from a different angle:
In the big datacenters tape libraries are still very important, and lots
of them have a scsi attachement. virtio-blk certainly is not the right
way to handle those. Furthermore it seems even pretty hard to craft
a virtio-tape since most of those libraries have vendor specific library
controls (via sg). We would need to duplicate scsi generic (hint, hint :-)
virtio-scsi seems to be a basic duplication of virtio-blk except that it seems to
fix some problems virtio-blk has. Namely queue parameter discover,
which virtio-blk doesn't seem to do. There may also be a reason to cut
the stack lower down. Error handling is most often cited for this, but
no-one's satisfactorily explaned why it's better to do error handling in
the guest instead of the host.
Could someone please explain to me why you can't simply fix virtio-blk?
I dont think that virtio-scsi will replace virtio-blk everywhere. For non-scsi
block devices, image files or logical volumes virtio-blk seems to be the right
approach, I think.
+1
virtio-scsi is superior w.r.t:
- Device support: tapes, cdroms, other
AFAICT any type of non TYPE_DISK struct scsi_device passthrough is going
to currently require virtio-scsi in order to work.
- Does guest-host mapped multipath
The logic that comes with target_core_fabric_configfs.c and the native
target control plane gives a host-side (tcm_vhost) fabric driver generic
explict/implict ALUA multipath support by default.
I think there are some interesting possibilities for paravirtualized
ALUA multipath.. 8-)
- Supports plenty of virtual disks mapped to the guest w/o need for a
pci slot per each virtio-blk
Ouch, virtio-blk lacks multi-lun per pci slot support..?
Only if you use the pci multi-function option but that kills standard
hot unplug
- offload fancy/new/sophisticated scsi commands from the guest to the
storage array w/o need for qemu implementation. Example XCOPY.
...
There are some more goodies like ability to support windows guest
clustering w/o hacky versions of scsi pass through over virtio-blk.
virtio-blk is also a candidate to change the request based towards bio
based implementation, so sticking to it does not buy us too much.
MSFT cluster guests that require SPC-3 PR support can run today with
tcm_loop LLD SCSI LUNs + SG_IO/BSG + right megasas QEMU HBA emulation,
but I do agree this would be better served by virtio-scsi for guests
that require SPC-3 PR support or passthrough.
--nab
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