Sorry about the missing subject line in the previous mail Got confused when using git-send-patch :-)
regards ronnie sahlberg On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Ronnie Sahlberg <ronniesahlb...@gmail.com> wrote: > Please find attached a patch to add built-in support for iSCSI into QEMU. > Please review and/or apply this patch. > > This is the latest version of this patch and I think I have addressed all > previous concerns and suggestions. > > > Using built-in iSCSI support has many advantages for certain use cases : > > * if you have very many iSCSI devices it may be impractical to expose > all LUNs to the underlying host. > > * the devices become private to the guest and are not visible to the host. > This automatically avoids polluting the page-cache on the host. > > * security, the devices are private to the guest, which prevents other guests > or the host itself from accessing the devices. > > * security, it allows non-root users a secure way to get private and password > protected access to the device by using CHAP authentication. > > * migration, many other virtualization systems provide built-in iscsi clients > like this. Also providing this as feature in QEMU may make it easier for such > users to migrate over to QEMU/KVM. > > * easier to maintain. For users with very many QEMU instances I think having > guest-private iscsi targets and LUNs may be easier to manage than 'huge set > of files in /dev/scsi/*' > > * easier to maintain, when copying a QEMU instance from one host to another, > this offers a more self-contained solution where the QEMU command line itself > cotnains all required storage configuration, instead of also having to > coordinate this move with setting up and tearing down open-iscsi logins on > the underlying hosts. > > > > > The patch has been tested by installing and running several distributions > such as RHEL6 and Ubuntu on devices, both system disk as well as the > installer CDROM as being iscsi devices. > > This testing has also been performed by running full QEMU under valgrind. > > Performance is comparable to using open-iscsi devices. > > >