state of iscsi_initiator?

[Andrew Snow]

I'm just playing with iSCSI now, on a fresh 7.1-STABLE machine connected 
to another FreeBSD box running ports/net/iscsi-target.

I am using the latest version 2.1 Initiator from:
ftp://ftp.cs.huji.ac.il/users/danny/freebsd/

It seems alot better now than when I last tried it.  The speed is 
constant at around 50MB/s for a single sequential read or write.  It 
also reconnected very quickly when I restarted the target.  I was even 
able to reboot the target box and I/O resumed perfectly once it finished 
booting!

The speed increased to 80mb/s when I ran two threads, which is close to 
the max performance for the network cards in this machine.


A couple of minor issues:

    1. Trouble shutting down iscontrol - after I kill -9 it stays around 
for a minute or more until it finally goes away.

    2. Under very heavy multi-threaded load, the client machine gets 
sluggish to respond, even to keystrokes on the console.  And if I 
shutdown the target, even local disk accesses on the client computer 
stop working after a while.

    (I don't think this is a problem with iSCSI initiator.  I suspect 
there's something in FreeBSD which pauses all disk I/O if the length of 
outstanding requests is too high, can anyone shed some light on this?)


Overall, a pleasant experience and shows how much good work has been 
done on iSCSI.  Congratulations Danny :-)


- Andrew