Building on the new in-kernel iSCSI initiator stack + released in &os; 10.0, and the recently added iSCSI offload + interface, Mellanox Technologies has begun developing iSCSI + extensions for RDMA (iSER) initiator support to enable efficient + data movement using the hardware offload capabilities of + Mellanox's 10, 40, 56, and 100 gigabit IB/Ethernet adapters.
+ +Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) has been shown to + have a great value for storage applications. RDMA + infrastructure provides benefits such as zero-copy, CPU offload, + reliable transport, fabric consolidation and many more. The + iSER protocol eliminates some of the bottlenecks in the + traditional iSCSI/TCP stack, provides low latency and high + throughput, and is well suited for latency-aware workloads.
+ +This work includes a new ICL module that implements the + iSER initiator. The iSCSI stack is slightly modified to support + some extra features such as asynchronous IO completions, + unmapped data buffers, and data-transfer offloads. The user will + be able to choose iSER as the iSCSI transport with iscsictl.
+ +The project is in its initial implementation phase. The + code will be released under the BSD license and is expected to + be completed later this year.
+ + +