1 Chelsio S3 iSCSI Driver for Linux
6 The Chelsio T3 ASIC based Adapters (S310, S320, S302, S304, Mezz cards, etc.
7 series of products) support iSCSI acceleration and iSCSI Direct Data Placement
8 (DDP) where the hardware handles the expensive byte touching operations, such
9 as CRC computation and verification, and direct DMA to the final host memory
12 - iSCSI PDU digest generation and verification
14 On transmitting, Chelsio S3 h/w computes and inserts the Header and
15 Data digest into the PDUs.
16 On receiving, Chelsio S3 h/w computes and verifies the Header and
17 Data digest of the PDUs.
19 - Direct Data Placement (DDP)
21 S3 h/w can directly place the iSCSI Data-In or Data-Out PDU's
22 payload into pre-posted final destination host-memory buffers based
23 on the Initiator Task Tag (ITT) in Data-In or Target Task Tag (TTT)
26 - PDU Transmit and Recovery
28 On transmitting, S3 h/w accepts the complete PDU (header + data)
29 from the host driver, computes and inserts the digests, decomposes
30 the PDU into multiple TCP segments if necessary, and transmit all
31 the TCP segments onto the wire. It handles TCP retransmission if
34 On receiving, S3 h/w recovers the iSCSI PDU by reassembling TCP
35 segments, separating the header and data, calculating and verifying
36 the digests, then forwarding the header to the host. The payload data,
37 if possible, will be directly placed into the pre-posted host DDP
38 buffer. Otherwise, the payload data will be sent to the host too.
40 The cxgb3i driver interfaces with open-iscsi initiator and provides the iSCSI
41 acceleration through Chelsio hardware wherever applicable.
43 Using the cxgb3i Driver
44 =======================
46 The following steps need to be taken to accelerates the open-iscsi initiator:
48 1. Load the cxgb3i driver: "modprobe cxgb3i"
50 The cxgb3i module registers a new transport class "cxgb3i" with open-iscsi.
52 * in the case of recompiling the kernel, the cxgb3i selection is located at
54 SCSI device support --->
55 [*] SCSI low-level drivers --->
56 <M> Chelsio S3xx iSCSI support
58 2. Create an interface file located under /etc/iscsi/ifaces/ for the new
59 transport class "cxgb3i".
61 The content of the file should be in the following format:
62 iface.transport_name = cxgb3i
63 iface.net_ifacename = <ethX>
64 iface.ipaddress = <iscsi ip address>
66 * if iface.ipaddress is specified, <iscsi ip address> needs to be either the
67 same as the ethX's ip address or an address on the same subnet. Make
68 sure the ip address is unique in the network.
70 3. edit /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf
71 The default setting for MaxRecvDataSegmentLength (131072) is too big;
72 replace with a value no bigger than 15360 (for example 8192):
74 node.conn[0].iscsi.MaxRecvDataSegmentLength = 8192
76 * The login would fail for a normal session if MaxRecvDataSegmentLength is
77 too big. A error message in the format of
78 "cxgb3i: ERR! MaxRecvSegmentLength <X> too big. Need to be <= <Y>."
79 would be logged to dmesg.
81 4. To direct open-iscsi traffic to go through cxgb3i's accelerated path,
82 "-I <iface file name>" option needs to be specified with most of the
83 iscsiadm command. <iface file name> is the transport interface file created